Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520931671

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Beyond the Neon

Lights

Beyond the Neon Lights Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century H A N C H A O LU

University BERKELEY

of California LOS ANGELES

Press LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1999 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lu, Hanchao. Beyond the neon lights : everyday Shanghai in the early twentieth century / Hanchao Lu. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 2 1 5 6 4 - 8 (alk. paper) 1 . Shanghai (China)—Social life and customs—20th century. 2. Shanghai (China)—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Shanghai (China)—Economic conditions—20th century. I. Title. DS796.S25 L8 1 9 9 9 951'.132—dc2i

98-31298 CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America 08 xo

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) ( P e r m a n e n c e of

Paper).

Parts of the following chapters are revised versions of materials published elsewhere: chapter 3: "Creating Urban Outcasts: Shantytowns in Shanghai, 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 5 0 , " Journal

of Urban History

2 1 , no. 5 (July

1995): 5 6 3 - 9 6 ; chapter 6: " A w a y from Nanking Road: Small Store and Neighborhood Life in Modern Shanghai," Journal

of Asian Studies

54,

no. 1 (February 1995): 9 2 - 1 2 3 . These revised portions appear here by permission.

To the memory of my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Notes on Chinese Currency and Romanization

xvii

Introduction

i

Urban-Rural Relations: A Continuum or a Gulf?

3

The City and Modernity: The Making of a Commercial Culture

8

How "China-Centered" Are We? PART 1

Chapter 1

17

IN SEARCH OF AN URBAN IDENTITY

Going to Shanghai

25

From Segregation to Mixed Residence

25

From the "Five Lakes and Four Seas"

36

Dragons and Fishes Jumbled Together

55

Chapter 2

The World of Rickshaws

67

Rickshaws

68

Rickshaw Pullers

75

The Other Side of the Coin

81

PART 2

Chapter 3

A PLACE TO STICK AN AWL

Escaping the Shantytown

A Museum of Global Architecture Shantytowns Shantytown Dwellers Factory Employment: A Shantytown Dream

109 110 116 126 131

viii

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Contents

Chapter 4

The Homes of the Little Urbanites

138

The Rise of the Modern Real Estate Market The Evolution of Alleyway Houses Second Landlords The Shikumen Melange

139 143 160 167

PART 3

UNDER THE EAVES OF SHANGHAI

Chapter 5

Behind Stone Portals

189

The Men Who Woke Up a City

189

Peddlers

198

Neighbors

218

Chapter 6

Beyond Stone Portals

243

Commerce in a Living Room The "Little Food" Markets Shopping on the Block The Politics of Intervention

243 268 276 286

Conclusion

294

The Past

296

The West

307

The Communists

315

Appendix

1: A Survey

Appendix

2: List of Informants

Notes References Glossary

of the Origins of Shanghai

Residents

323 329 333

Cited

393

and Index

427

Illustrations

Maps i . Growth of Shanghai, 1846-1914

30

2. Shanghai in the Republican era

4i

Figures 1. A bird's-eye view of Shanghai

42

2. Heading for Shanghai

47

3. A woman and her children

49

4. Rickshaws at an alleyway entrance

70

5. A rickshaw man on the Bund

74

6. A rickshaw station 7. Teahouse in the Chinese city

87 111

8. A pawnshop

113

9. The Great World

11

5

10. Shantytown crowd

128

11. Stamps showing shikumen

144

12. Fukang Li 13. From multi-bay to single-bay houses

147 148

14. Xiafei Fang

153

15. Jianye Li

155

16. A latter-day shikumen

159 178

17. A Chinese Communist Party shrine

ix

x

/

Illustrations

18. HuileLi

183

19. A row of shikumen houses

190

20. Men who don't know New Year's Day

192

21. A nightsoil dock

195

22. A food seller

201

23. Impressions of Shanghai alleyway life

208

24. A street barber

211

25. A street library

213

26. A tinker at work

214

27. A street game of chance

216

28. The general layout of an alleyway-house compound

244

29. A front-row house

245

30. A rice store

248

3 1 . A neighborhood variety store

252

32. A sesame cake store

265

33. A food market

273

34. Bride's sedan chair

304

35. Funeral procession

305

36. Wheelbarrow

306

Tables

1 . The overlap of native place and trade in Republican Shanghai

51

2. Zhiyuan (white-collar employees) in Republican Shanghai

64

3. Rickshaw fares in Shanghai, 1 9 1 7 - 3 7

71

4. Public rickshaws in Shanghai, 1934

71

5. Insurance report of the Pullers' Mutual Aid Association of Shanghai, May 1 , 1 9 3 6 , to September 3 0 , 1 9 3 6

82

6. Subletting in Republican Shanghai (samples from an early-i950s survey)

163

7. Residents in Zhengming Li, Shanghai, 1 9 3 3 - 5 1

223

8. Neighborhood stores on Hart Road, 1940s

247

xi

Acknowledgments

For help with a book about the lives of ordinary people in old Shanghai, m y first and foremost thanks go to numerous veteran residents of the city for providing me with rich and graphic information about life in the prerevolutionary era. I am particularly thankful for their enthusiasm and good humor: while I often inquired in some detail about their lives in the "old society," a topic sometimes at the edge of the taboo in the People's Republic of China not too long ago, virtually no one asked me the potentially embarrassing question of w h y a returned student from the United States had become so inquisitive about some seemingly trivial matters of the past. In Chinese academia, I benefited greatly from being associated with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS). I am especially indebted to Xiong Yuezhi of the Institute of History of S A S S and Lu Hanlong of the Institute of Sociology of S A S S for their support over the years, ranging from facilitating access to library and archival materials to arranging surveys and interviews. Song Zuanyou was extremely helpful in giving me valuable research assistance even when I was not in China. I also thank Chen Zhengshu, Feng Shaoting, Li Tiangang, Luo Suwen, Pan Junxiang, Shen Zuwei, Tang Zhenchang, Xu Min and Zhang Jishun for their support of m y research in Shanghai. Joseph Esherick, Kenneth Pomeranz, and David Strand carefully read the manuscript and offered insightful and detailed comments that greatly helped refine the theme of the book. I am particularly happy to acknowledge m y gratitude to them. I am also deeply in debt to David Buck, Sherman Cochran, David Faure, and William Rowe, who have given me sound advice on some chapters of the book. I would like to thank Linda Grove for encouraging me to advance m y xiii

xiv

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Acknowledgments

studies in the United States when I was an academic vagrant in Japan. Without her vision I may never have written this book. M y greatest intellectual debt goes to Philip Huang, who ushered me into the vigorous field of Chinese socioeconomic history and constantly showed his confidence in m y work. Kathryn Bernhardt, Deborah Davis, Benjamin Elman, Eric Monkkonen, Fred Notehelfer, Douglas Reynolds, and Richard J. Smith have been valuable sources of inspiration in the writing of this book. I particularly wish to thank Perry Link and Jonathan Spence; their encouragement and support of this research have meant a great deal to me. Over the years of research and writing I benefited from discussions with many scholars. I offer my thanks to Ronald Bayor, Marie-Claire Bergère, Robert Bickers, Francesca Bray, Wellington Chan, Clayton Dube, Mark Elvin, August Giebelhaus, Noriko Kamachi, David King, Chi-Kong Lai, Chang Liu, Tao Tao Liu, Stephen MacKinnon, Brian Martin, Andrea McElderry, Kerrie McPherson, Geoff Millar, Zane Miller, Susan Naquin, Matthew Somer, Stephen Usselman, Xi Wang, Xiaoping Ye, and Zhang Zhongli (Chung-li Chang) for their comments and help that contributed to m y research on various occasions. I thank Ming-te Pan for always being cheerfully available for discussion, Jiahua Lu for sending me books from Princeton, and Songhua Shi and Wei Ding for solving crises in computer word processing and drawing. I also thank Sheila Levine, Laura Driussi and Rachel Berchten of the University of California Press for handling the manuscript with care and efficiency. I owe a double debt to Robert Hawkins, Robert McMath, and Gregory Nobles for their support of this project and for their leadership at Georgia Tech in creating a rich and supportive research environment for the humanities and social sciences. For financial support, I am grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation, China Times Foundation, Georgia Tech Foundation, and Shanghai Research Center for grants that made m y annual summer trips ( 1 9 9 3 - 9 7 ) to China possible. Romain Rolland once said that human gratitude is like the fruit on a tree: it decays if not picked in time. I would like to alter the metaphor and give it a more optimistic tone by saying that if the fruit is made into wine, it mellows with age. For over a decade, Richard Gunde has most generously lent me his expertise and, in particular, shared myriad thoughts with me about this book. To him, I am profoundly grateful. One of m y mentors in China, a renowned author and in many ways a quite "Westernized" individual, once expressed his disapproval to me of what he believed to be an unnecessary, or even affected, practice among yangren (foreigners) of thanking one's laopo (wife) in a book acknowledg-

Acknowledgments

/

xv

ment. He implied that a spouse is an all too natural part of an author's life to be acknowledged in public. Cultural shock, one might say. Yet I cannot help but be a rebellious student—my final thanks go to my family: to Linlin for her love, to Freddy and Jeffrey for being adorable children. Their childhood constantly reminds me of my own and hence of my loving parents, to whose memory this book is dedicated.

Notes on Chinese Currency and Romanization

The symbol " $ " and the word "dollar" in the text refer to Chinese silver dollars (yinyuan;

used before November 1 9 3 5 ) and Chinese yuan (known

as fabi, or "legal currency"; used after November 1935); the two were roughly equivalent. The silver-copper exchange rate fluctuated constantly and varied by region. In Shanghai in the early 1930s the exchange rates were 1 silver dollar to about 300 to 3 3 0 coppers, and 1 copper to 1 0 cash (wen). Based on the degree of purity, silver dollars were categorized into "big dollars" (dayang) and "small dollars" (xiaoyang). In the early 1930s, 1 small dollar equaled about .76 big dollar. Unless otherwise indicated, dollars quoted in the text were big dollars. Chinese currency in the 1940s was unstable and chaotic both in name and in value. In order to avoid confusion, 1940s prices mentioned in the text represent, wherever possible, conversions of the yuan (fabi) according to its value just before the war ( 1 9 3 6 - 3 7 ) ; the main criterion for conversion is the price of rice. I have used pinyin romanization with a few exceptions for originally romanized street names (such as Nanking Road instead of Nanjing Road) and conventional romanization for people's names (such as A h Q instead of A Q ) .

xvii

Introduction

The history of modern Shanghai has in recent years received an extraordinary amount of scholarly attention both in the West and in China. In the West, readers have been struck by the variety as well as academic depth of the literature on Shanghai that has appeared since the early 1980s. Studies on the city's history touch upon a wide range of topics in the political, economical, social, and cultural realms: from the indigenous growth of pre-treaty-port Shanghai to the presence of the West in the city, from the Qing "circuit intendants" (or Daotai) to the "Mixed Court," from traditional merchant organizations to modern entrepreneurship, from public health to higher education, from the police establishment to the underground, from labor strikes to student protests, from native-place associations to social biases, from the divisions among intellectuals to the taxonomy of prostitution, and so on. 1 Like any high-quality research that focuses on a regional topic, most of what has been published has aimed at and, to different degrees, successfully brought out broader issues whose significance reaches beyond that of a single city. It is a blessing to scholars outside China that a similar efflorescence of research on the history of Shanghai appeared almost simultaneously in the city itself. Starting in 1978 as part of a nationwide program to revive the Chinese tradition of writing local history, or fangzhi,

researchers in

Shanghai made great efforts to continue the work of an official Shanghai history writing group known as Shanghaishi tongzhiguan (Institute for the History of Shanghai), headed by the noted scholar-official Liu Yazi ( 1 8 8 6 - 1 9 5 8 ) . 2 Under this movement, research on Shanghai has reached beyond the limits of conventional gazetteer compilation. Source materials on Shanghai of various types, including collections of historical materials on a given topic, archival materials, reminiscences, historical anecdotes,

1

2

/

Introduction

and documentary photographs, as well as research monographs and treatises, appeared in good quality and quantity. 3 More significant, research in Shanghai has been internationally oriented; although scholarly engagement based on mutual understanding of analytical theories and methodologies between researchers in and outside China still leaves much to be desired, communications among researchers of Shanghai are among the best in academia. 4 In this rich and colorful gallery of portraits of Shanghai, what has not been adequately portrayed is the daily life of ordinary people. If human history involves primarily the people, and if what shapes people's outlook and affects their activities involves the places they live and work, then the importance of daily life in historical research needs no further explanation. The purpose of this book is to portray the quotidian aspects of the lives of the people of Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century, with particular attention to everyday life in the city's residential quarters. A city as large and complex as Shanghai—indeed, it has been one of the world's largest and most cosmopolitan metropolises—contains within it an incredibly wide variety of people. Although in most years less than 3 percent of the city's population was foreign born, this portion of the population came from virtually everywhere in the world and, as far as social composition is concerned, included an impressive array, from vagabonds and prostitutes to diplomats and parvenus. The Chinese residents of Shanghai were, in a sense, also foreigners: they came from all provinces in the nation. The majority were rural folk who flocked to the city looking for a better life. The most numerous of the Chinese immigrants were of two major groups: the little urbanites (xiaoshimin), as they have been called, and the urban poor. About three-quarters of the city's dwellings consisted of a single type called lilong (alleyway or lane) houses: these were the homes of the average city people (the little urbanites) for about a century following the 1880s. A close look at alleyway-house neighborhoods—where well over half the residents hailed from the countryside—reveals how life was lived in the world of the middle and lower-middle classes of Shanghai. This forms the subject of most of this book. A s for the poor of Shanghai—who, like the xiaoshimin, were almost entirely from the countryside—most ended up in the many shantytowns that sprang up across the city. I will also explore life in these hovels. The experiences of the xiaoshimin and the urban poor reveal the interplay of the customs, habits, and traditions that these "peasants of yesterday" brought into the city with the new, modern, and Western aspects of

Introduction

/

3

urban life. With this focus in mind, I have aimed to delineate the daily life of the city's ciphers and nonentities—at least that is what these people were in the eyes of the city's elites, whose life, in turn, receives the least attention in this study. A s m y research for this study unfolded, three major issues emerged. Although the research is entirely locally focused, the issues it bears on are national in scope. B y the end of m y study, these issues had become the themes into which I had woven bits of empirical evidence and against which I had tested theoretical assumptions. The first issue is the character of urbanrural relations in modern China: while the Chinese people rapidly cast off the notion of cities as uninteresting or dangerous and came to think of them as superior to the countryside, was a metropolis like Shanghai in fact so modern, so sophisticated, so Westernized, and in other ways unique that it was alien to hinterland China? How did Shanghai's commercial culture contribute to the sense among outsiders that the city was somehow alien, somehow not quite Chinese? Derived from this issue is the question of how the people of Shanghai identified themselves: what did it mean to them to be a Shanghairen (a Shanghai person, or Shanghainese), and what sense of community, if any, emerged from living in tightly packed neighborhoods? Finally, as part of the issue of modernity and identity, there is the question of how appropriate Western-derived assumptions are to plumbing daily life in a Chinese city.

Urban-Rural Relations: A Continuum or a Gulf? Researchers of Chinese urban history have argued that there is a striking difference between traditional China and medieval Europe in regard to urban-rural relations. Whereas European cities stood out as islands of culture in a sea of rural backwardness, Chinese cities were integrated with their surrounding rural villages in all political, cultural, and socioeconomic dimensions. One of the central themes that G. William Skinner and his colleagues present in the monumental volume The City in Late

Imperial

China is the urban-rural continuum in traditional China. China up to the nineteenth century was a harmonious landscape in which cities and villages at various administrative and commercial levels as well as in different geographic regions were integrated with each other. Accordingly, there was no sharp contrast or gap between city and country, particularly in the social and cultural realms. Even obvious landmarks like city walls did not set the city apart from the countryside. 5 A s a result of the urban-rural continuum, the sense of urban superior-

4

/

Introduction

ity commonly associated with Western cultural tradition did not prevail in traditional China. The reasons for this are multifaceted. First, Chinese elites were landed gentry-literati whose essential socioeconomic base was in rural communities rather than urban centers. The elites who resided in the city, as well as a large number of people who pursued occupations that kept them away from their rural home, always retained their ties to their native place: it was there that they maintained their formal place of residence and their hengchan,

or permanent property (i.e., land), and it was

there that their family tomb and lineage temple were to be f o u n d — i n short, their roots and identity were still rural. 6 Also, Chinese cultural life did not fall into two widely divergent spheres or display characteristic dichotomies between the urban and the rural. For one thing, Chinese cities were not necessarily cultural preserves and religious centers, as they were in Europe. Like men on a chessboard or stars in the sky, cultural and religious sites spread across China without any clear-cut division into urban and rural settings, thus denying the notion that the city (perhaps with a few exceptions, such as the capital city) was culturally superior to small towns and villages. Furthermore, unlike European cities Chinese cities did not possess a corporate identity, civic monuments, or "citizens" that set the city apart from its surrounding rural areas. Between towns and villages, frequent communication of various sorts and a flow of population in both directions integrated rural and urban areas in a way that made a sense of urban superiority groundless. 7 In fact, quite the opposite social sentiment could be detected: the city in traditional China often had a negative image. Before the Song dynasty ( 9 6 0 - 1 2 7 9 ) , Chinese cities were predominately administrative centers, inextricably associated with government yamen, taxation, the corvée, criminals, and lawsuits. Its political function tended to make the city a place held in awe, at least by peasants. The commercial character of Chinese cities in the post-Song era did not improve the peasants' overall image of the city. The vicious reputation of merchants and the stubborn social bias against commerce in Chinese society only added to their original awe of the city, the place where the yamen was located: they also came to see it as the place where cunning prevailed. Mark Elvin once observed, "The city was in some respects feared by peasants. One Ch'ing [Qing] official wrote that 'countryfolks are terrified to enter their country capital, dreading the officials as if they were tigers.' The city was a place where taxes and rents were often paid, and where lawsuits were tried. It was the haunt of criminals such as the 'market bullies' who were experts at victimizing peasants. In times of

Introduction

/

5

famine, it was in the city that farmers sold starving children whom they could no longer feed." 8 Not only the peasantry (who were, of course, the overwhelming majority of the population) but all of society to some degree viewed the city as an abomination. In a nation that highly valued its system of rule—an enormous body of peasants governed by a scant elite of scholar-officials— it is understandable that ideal society would be that in which people lived contentedly in the countryside. The great Chinese historian Sima Qian (c. 1 4 5 - 9 0 B.C.) wrote of men aged sixty or seventy who had never visited towns as evidence of peace, order, and prosperity. 9 Such thinking endured. A s the eminent seventeenth-century thinker Gu Yanwu ( 1 6 1 3 - 8 2 ) commented, "If people live in the country, the society will be in order; if people live in the city, the society will be in turmoil. People living in the country results in reclamation of land and the peace of farms; people will inevitably have a permanent faith [hengxin]. People living in the city results in onerous corvee and frequent lawsuits; it will be impossible to expect people to have a permanent faith." 1 0 This is a succinct statement of the mainstream view on urban-rural relations in traditional China. The twentieth century saw a dramatic change in this age-old value system. Although distrust of the city lingered on in some respects, modern, industrialized, and highly commercialized cities came to be seen as better places than small towns and villages. This sweeping reassessment was chiefly brought on by the economic opportunities cities presented. The rural deterioration that paralleled the industrialization of the city in the early twentieth century accelerated urban-rural differentiation and sharpened the gap between city and country—the urban-rural continuum was gradually replaced by an urban-rural gulf. That this occurred in the turbulent age of twentieth-century China itself would have brought a w r y smile to the face of Gu Yanwu, inasmuch as his viewpoint had, unfortunately, been confirmed. In trying to fathom the depth of the urban-rural gulf, one constantly comes up against the inescapable reality that hundreds of thousands of rural immigrants in urban areas lived a life of bare subsistence yet fiercely stuck to the city. These rural immigrants formed the majority of the urban poor in Shanghai. B y virtue of their poverty, they were denied access to most of the facilities and conveniences a modern city offers and suffered social discrimination. Yet all the hardship and disadvantages did not drive them out of the city. On the contrary, where possible they brought their families from the villages to the city.

6

/

Introduction

In Republican-era Shanghai, two groups of urban poor best reflect the lure of the city: rickshaw pullers and street beggars. Both were multitudinous and ever present. In his renowned novel Camel Xiangzi, Lao She describes his protagonist, a former farmer lured by opportunity to Beijing in the 1920s, where he made a living as a rickshaw puller: "The city gave him everything. Even starving he would prefer it to the village. . . . Even if you begged in the city you could get meat or fish soup. In the village all one could hope for was cornmeal." Citing Lao She's unadorned words, David Strand comments, "Because of the great disparity in urban and rural incomes, even a 'lower class' occupation like rickshaw pulling might satisfy a peasant's ambition for a better livelihood." 1 1 This was certainly so in Republican Shanghai. Close to 100,000 public-rickshaw pullers labored in Shanghai in the late 1930s, competing for about 25,000 rickshaws for hire in the city. Two shifts around the clock yielded about 50,000 jobs for pullers. Fifteen to sixteen shifts per month was considered a normal, fulltime workload for a puller. In addition, there were thousands of men hired to pull private rickshaws. The overwhelming majority of this army of rickshaw pullers were peasants who had come directly from the poverty-ridden villages to the city seeking opportunity. M a n y of them, in fact, could not survive in their native villages, which had been devastated by natural disasters, banditry, and war. They came to the city for bare subsistence. For them, the move was not necessarily a search for a better life but for life itself. Merely to survive in the city was a powerful measure of the economic opportunity they found there. Although the majority of them lived in sheer poverty, survival itself was reckoned to be success. As a popular Chinese saying put it, " A bitter life is better than a comfortable death" (haosi bum

ehuo).

There was another group of former peasants whose experience in the city fit, unfortunately but perfectly, the philosophy expressed by this proverb: beggars. Shanghai in the 1930s had about 20,000 to 25,000 professional beggars who were, like the rickshaw pullers and most of the other urban poor, refugees from rural poverty. Of all the 360 callings {hang) that the Chinese used as an analogy for all walks of life, mendicants were the lowest. As another Chinese saying goes, in a human life "there is no catastrophe except death; one cannot be poorer than a b e g g a r " 1 2 (chu si wu da'nan, taofan zai

buqiong).

However, an exploration of the beggars' world in Shanghai reveals that mendicancy was not necessarily, as generally thought, a downward movement in social status, a mark of improvidence, or the outcome of individual failure. In Republican Shanghai, mendicancy was a highly organized pro-

Introduction

/

7

fession and one that not every newcomer could easily enter. For rural immigrants in the city, mendicancy was sometimes a preferred livelihood, and one that denoted privilege. A popular Chinese saying dramatizes the preference for begging: "Having been a beggar for three years, one would decline an offer to be an official." 1 3 This truly happened in some cases. A beggar in Guangzhou once declined an offer from his brother-in-law to serve as an official in a county office, saying that he would rather "be accompanied by the Five Hundred Monks [i.e., his fellow beggars] than bow himself down for the Five dou of Rice [i.e., a salary]." 1 4 With all its myths, tactics, and organizations, begging became an urban "job" option and a part of the lure of the city in modern China. A s I have suggested, urban poverty was more a result of rural crisis than a product of urban growth. The lure of the two lowest urban occupations (one, pulling a rickshaw, was described as a job that literally entailed "running like oxen and horses" [niu ma zou] and the other, begging, was mournfully paired with death) reveals more than anything else the depth of the urban-rural gulf in modern China. Since urban poverty in twentieth-century China was primarily the result of rural depression that made the city a symbol of opportunity for the impoverished and desperate masses of the countryside, any means that promised bare subsistence was taken as a straw to be grasped before drowning in an ocean of destitution. Shanghai in its heyday was notorious as a city where, in famine years, police and charities had to pick up thousands of corpses. Most of the victims were new arrivals from the countryside and the abandoned infants of the poor. 15 One may argue that a city like this can hardly be described as a paradise for the poor. Truly it was not. However, in comparison with the wretched who died on the streets and the much more numerous victims of famine and war in the villages, the destitute survivors in Shanghai—of which rickshaw pullers and beggars were the most visible—could justifiably be regarded as the lucky. The idea of the superiority of the city has been criticized as "a cliché of our Western cultural traditions," and one that does not fit traditional Chinese society. 16 But by the early twentieth century this Western cliché had clearly captured the imagination of the common people of China. Rural people clinging to the city for sheer survival gave substance to the notion in a down-to-earth and unadorned way. It also showed that the concept was not imported but was a product of Chinese social reality and a summary of ordinary people's life experiences. The economic opportunities, convenience of daily life, and richness of cultural and social life in the city, all granted incomparable and irresistible advantages to the city over the coun-

8

/

Introduction

try. As twentieth-century China's most modernized city, Shanghai concentrated and highlighted the attractions of an urban life, giving birth to the boastful saying "East and West, Shanghai is the best." 1 7 This sense of Shanghai's superiority is also apparent in a folk song that mocks the vanity of a country girl: A country girl wants to imitate the manners of Shanghai. Desperately trying, with all her strength, she still cannot get it. Ah! she is now a little bit closer —but fashions in Shanghai have already changed.18 What we see here is not just a satirical sketch of an innocent country girl, but an allegory of the backwardness of the countryside.

The City and Modernity: The Making of a Commercial

Culture

Although the old negative image of the city faded, it did not entirely disappear. While the city was generally seen as a better place to live than the country, many (and not only the peasantry and earthbound gentry class) continued to despise the city as somehow irrational and dangerous. B y the twentieth century, judgment on the city was not single-minded but had become a mixture of contradictions, with admiration, envy, fear, and contempt all mixed together. Although sentiment for the city became increasingly positive, some measure of the old awe lingered even after the Communist revolution. This contradiction became something people were aware of, and it was often revealed in satirical literature written by socially sensitive writers. Lu Xun ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 3 6 ) epitomized peasant mentality in his famous character A h Q, a day laborer in Wei village who always thought well of himself. A t the top of A h Q's "list of prides" was that he had been to town a couple of times. Yet he could be contemptuous of townsfolk too. For instance, Wei Villagers called a seat made from a three-foot plank a longbench and so did Ah Q, but the townsfolk called it a stickbench. "That's not right, that's flatass dumb!" he thought to himself. And how about fish? When frying bigheads, Wei Villagers would toss chopped scallions into the pan, but the townsfolk always used shredded ones. "That's not right, that's flatass stupid!" he thought to himself. "On the other hand, I gotta remember that next to me, Wei Villagers are just a bunch of hicks. They've never even seen how bigheads are fried in town." 1 9

Introduction

/

9

Naturally, if the object of attention were not a nearby town but a great metropolis like Shanghai, this mixed feeling toward urban life would be still more drastic and dramatic. Indeed, mixed or contradictory sentiment was a frequent topic in popular fiction in early-twentieth-century Shanghai. Bao Tianxiao's The Countryman

Revisits Shanghai,

in Shanghai's leading newspaper, Shenbao,

which was serialized

is a good example. Bao de-

scribed the unpleasant but comical experience of a hayseed in Shanghai in the early thirties. From the countryman's point of view, Shanghai is "expensive, foreign, irrational, petty-minded, impersonal, depraved, and chaotic." The obstinate man dislikes virtually everything he sees in the city: from the name of railway station tickets, the classes of streetcars, and the arrangement of shops to the distant relations of the people, the calculating character of society, the shamelessness of prostitutes, and so on. However, while the city's moral decay is most evident in the case of a village girl lured to the city to be a prostitute, even this old peasant realizes that the city is a place where great money can be made: "Did not even this poor lost daughter send enough money back to the countryside to build a fine cement house for her parents?" 2 0 Two years after Bao published this piece, Mao Dun in his classic Midnight started with the dramatic death of old Mr. Wu, a wealthy member of the gentry who arrives in Shanghai to visit his elder son, a modern entrepreneur. Sitting in a motorcar of the latest design, holding an ancient classic, and observing the street scene of the "Sinners Paradise," the old man is overwhelmed by the frenzy of the city. He is shocked when he sees "a half-naked young woman sitting up in a rickshaw, fashionably dressed in a transparent, sleeveless voile blouse, displaying her bare legs and thighs." In the old man's eyes, the countless lighted windows of the towering skyscrapers gleam like the eyes of devils and the traffic becomes a snakelike stream of black monsters, "each with a pair of blinding lights for eyes, their horns blaring, [which] bore down upon him, nearer and nearer!" All this causes him to close his eyes tight in terror, and tremble all over. The first thing that the old man seizes upon when he recovers from his dizziness is the ravenous way his younger son had gazed at the half-naked woman from the car window, accompanied by his daughter's complaint that "father would not like me to dress pretty!" The overwhelming contrast of what he saw upon entering the city, and the constant thought that "of all the vices sexual indulgence is the cardinal; of all the virtues filial piety is the supreme" drumming in his mind, bring on a fatal stroke the very evening of his arrival at his son's luxurious modern home. 2 1

io

/

Introduction

In some way Mao Dun's novel reflects the feeling of alienation and disorientation experienced by many people who came to the city from a rural or less urban background, including the author, who himself grew up in a Jiangnan rural town and came to Shanghai to work as an editor at the Commercial Press. While Mao Dun delineated alienation and disorientation through a fictional figure, his contemporary Yu Dafu ( 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 4 5 ) was forthright in expressing his own feelings. Born and raised in a small town in Zhejiang, where his neighbors included firewood choppers and vegetable peddlers, Yu Dafu noted that his first impression of Shanghai was of "being surrounded by women's pearls and make-up, smelling their perfume, and living in the shadow of the hairs on their temple; all of these almost made a newly arrived country youth like me out of breath. I felt that I was going to fall into a coma." Yu described city life as "perverted and decadent," characterized by a "scramble for money, openness of crime, waste of spirit, and rampage of carnality"; he asked, "after all, was this the goal of mankind?" 2 2 His diaries, particularly those written in Shanghai, were full of sad and depressed sentiments over things urban, yet without the city, he proclaims, his life would have been meaningless. 23 Yu was known for portraying sensational female characters, and his personal love life and marriage were much publicized. His female protagonists were remarkably consistent: all were urbane, charming, novel, yet full of temptation and danger—like the city itself. 24 Perry Link describes the popular mentality toward the city (in particular, Shanghai) as "anxious ambivalence." 2 5 Other scholars of Shanghai have made a similar observation: the city's "everyday life was suffused with ambivalence." 26 But, w h y was there this ambivalence? W h y was it not limited to outsiders who lived in the country (whose complaints about the city might be dismissed as "sour grapes"), but felt as well by those who lived in and apparently benefited from the city? The ambivalence was arguably derived from the gulf between the countryside—which, with some noticeable exceptions, was bound by tradition, largely untouched by modernity, and conservative—and the city, which was less concerned about tradition, more open to modernity, and progressive. Like many commonly used but loosely defined terms, both "tradition" (or "traditionalism") and "modernity" invite broad and sometimes divergent interpretations. In modern China, traditionalism was frequently associated with things indigenous and an attitude of looking back in time. Modernity, however, was associated with things foreign and an attitude of looking forward. 27 This is particularly true in the case of Shanghai: the city was the nation's leading treaty port, its largest commercial center, and its

Introduction

/

11

most Westernized metropolis. Ambivalence toward the city in general and Shanghai in particular reflected earthbound China's contradictory feelings towards things new, unorthodox, and foreign. From the late Qing through the socialist era, the Chinese have seen Shanghai in many different ways, but in the final analysis there are only two views that count: the city is a symbol of economic opportunities to be seized, or it is a trap of moral degeneration (including the triumph of Western imperialism) to be shunned or condemned. One might think that strong, contradictory views like these could easily divide people into opposing groups. But in Shanghai these views were by no means divisive. Rather, it was clear that any individual could hold both views and not feel ridiculous about doing so. Criticism of the city came from not only the conservative, Confucianismminded moral camp but also the progressives. From Wang Tao ( 1 8 2 8 - 9 7 ) , one of the nation's pioneer reformists in the late Qing, to Chen Duxiu ( 1 8 8 0 - 1 9 4 2 ) , the Communist radical, writers portrayed Shanghai as an evil empire where human dignity was crushed by greed and lust, and Chinese pride was trampled by barbarian foreign devils (or, to use a later term, Western imperialism). 28 Even the terminology used to convey the image of Shanghai was consistent across ideological lines and time periods. From the late Qing to the era of the People's Republic, da ran'gang, or a gigantic dye vat, was one of the most popular metaphors used to describe Shanghai, implying that the "spiritual pollution" (to borrow a recent political neologism) of the city was so contaminative and inevitable that anyone who lived there might be unconsciously and indelibly "dyed." A s a local saying put it, "One could not clean oneself even by jumping into the Huangpu River" (tiaojin Huangpu jiang ye

xibuqing).29

As an essentially rural-based movement, the Communist revolution inevitably inherited the ambivalence toward Shanghai. The city's solid industrial and financial base and fine workforce that were built in the prerevolutionary period have been generally recognized to be invaluable national resources. For decades, the city's contribution to China's national revenue was incredibly high, far beyond any conceivable normal share of a single city in a country of China's size. 30 But Shanghai's economic contributions did not prevent the regime from sticking to its preconceived prejudice, which was of course based on an all too important ideology, that the city had been an evil bridgehead of foreign encroachment and the supreme headquarters of domestic reactionaries and therefore should be condemned. The story of the "Good Eighth Company on Nanking Road" (Nanjing

12

/

Introduction

Lu shang Haobalian),

a People's Liberation A r m y unit stationed in down-

town Shanghai, offered a national role model in the 1960s. The promotion of the Good Eighth Company preceded and then paralleled the politicalmoral campaign to "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng" personally trumpeted by Mao Zedong. It dramatized the official, orthodox, negative view of Shanghai. At his post on Nanking Road, a soldier of the Eighth Company sighed to his fellow soldiers that "even the wind on Nanking Road smells good." This unadorned expression of feeling was taken as a dangerous sign of the corrosive influence of bourgeois ideas, of which Shanghai (and, in particular, Nanking Road) was a symbol. The entire story of the Eighth Company involved a single theme: how to resist such influences. The Good Eighth Company on Nanking Road, which was the official honorary title the unit earned in 1963, became a national role model simply because the unit, established in rural north China during the Civil War, was able to maintain an essentially rural lifestyle while stationed in the midst of Shanghai's urban dissipation. 31 No wonder stories such as the following were propagated. A soldier of the Good Eighth Company was reluctant to see his wife, who had cheerfully come from their home village to visit him in Shanghai. After having experienced the dazzling city life, the soldier disdained the woman's rough and rustic manner. Like the exclamation "Even the wind in Nanking Road smells good," the soldier's "deviation" was treated as an indication—an even more serious indication—of the corrosive effects of the city. A f t e r much political education (or brainwashing, one might say), the soldier was back to "normal." The happy ending, as it was plotted into a drama named Sentries under Neon, was that once the deviant soldier took off his leather shoes and put on cotton-cloth shoes (handmade by his wife), and once he and his wife together enjoyed their "down home" food—wozvotou (steamed buns made of maize or sorghum)—things were once again right. 32 The assumption here, as well as what lay behind feelings of "anxious ambivalence," was that Shanghai was different from the rest of China: the city represented a modernity that was alien to the nation. But the question remains, how sound was the assumption? Or, to put it more precisely, how modern were the city and its people? If modernization is, by one definition, "the process by which societies have been and are being transformed under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution," we encounter two different images of Shanghai. 33 One is a metropolis that was a gigantic receptor of modern technological development. Running water, gas, electricity, telephones, streetcars, automobiles, air-conditioning—all appeared

Introduction

/

13

in Shanghai soon after they were introduced in the West. Nanking Road and the Bund featured imposing Western-style office buildings, including East Asia's tallest edifice (the Garden Hotel) and "the most sumptuous building from the Suez Canal to the Bering Sea" (the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank), and modern facilities such as China's first Otis escalator (in the Daxin Department Store) and the world's longest bar (in the Shanghai Club). 34 In addition to Shanghai's unquestionable position as the nation's first modern industrial, commercial, and financial center, the city was also known for its cultural sophistication—for its prosperity in literature and the fine arts (the first female nude model for painting stunned the nation in 1 9 1 3 ) , for its initiatives in Western-style higher education, for its development of modern media and the press, for its concentration of China's finest movie studios and theaters (which earned the city the appellation "Hollywood of the East"), for its leading role in fashion, and so on. But if we step away from the fashionable boulevards and look into the back alleys where the majority of the people of Shanghai lived, we witness another i m a g e — a less publicized but perhaps more realistic picture, and one that may be regarded as not modern. Calling it an urban village with a small-town type of life would be a more appropriate way to describe the scene. The majority of Shanghainese lived in two- or three-story brick attached houses built row upon row in the narrow alleyways that sprawled all over the city. A typical day in these neighborhoods started with the rumble of the two-wheeled nightsoil cart rolling along the back alleys. The din of the nightsoil man pulling his cart was always the first sound to break the stillness of the dawn. Chickens, commonly raised in these neighborhoods, bestirred themselves; the cockcrow echoed the nightsoil man's yelling for people to bring out their nightsoil to be collected. This daily collection of human waste was followed by the daily chore of lighting a gasoline c a n sized coal stove; coal was the only source of cooking energy in the kitchen of the average Shanghai family. 3 5 Wastepaper and wood chips were used to kindle a fire that in turn ignited egg-shaped briquettes of compressed coal. Wisps of smoke rose slowly into the air, painting streaks of gray against the whitish morning sky. This scene, viewed from a distant building on the Bund, was not unlike what one might see when viewing a rural village from a nearby hill: the smoke from the kitchen chimney of ordinary peasant households is a symbol of a lively community in rural China. But to see such a scene in Shanghai was odd in the sense that this was the first city in China to have piped gas and a modern sanitary system. But irony can be found in many aspects of the daily life of the city people. While Shanghai has the reputation of having a diverse and rich cuisine, the

14

/

Introduction

standard breakfast fare for the people of Shanghai was, and remains, tasteless paofan (made by reheating leftover cooked rice) and pickles. 36 In high fashion, the city led the nation ("the Paris of the East"), but ordinary people seldom purchased clothes off the rack at a fashionable shop. What most Shanghainese wore was made either by the handy housewife (as most of them were) or a Ningbo or Suzhou tailor, whose shop most likely sat right on the corner of the alley. It was also not unusual to see residents returning from a visit to the countryside carrying bundles of clothing with them. 37 While automobiles were found in abundance on the streets of Shanghai, most people had never taken a taxi; for the majority, to ride in a sedan would have been considered a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The twowheel rickshaw might be considered by some to be a symbol of Oriental backwardness, but it was an improvement over the wheelbarrow popularly used from the late Qing well into the Republican period. B y any standard, the city had excellent means of public transportation, but it was not uncommon to see people commuting, sometimes for miles, by the inborn means of transportation: walking, a practice known in jest as taking the "Number Eleven Bus." 3 8 The scene in the city's shantytowns was even more rural and primitive. Most of the residents there were denied access to the basic facilities that any modern city offers: electricity and running water. Using a pail to lift water from a nearby creek or crude well drilled by the residents and lighting a kerosene lamp were the ways these people got water and light. Paved roads were rare in these areas, not to mention sewers and regular garbage collection. One of the reasons that squatters' neighborhoods often sprang up along the banks of a river or a creek was that these places readily served as both a source of water and a dumping ground. The shantytowns of Shanghai were not just an example of the usual "urban problem" associated with any big city. They were an integral, fundamental part of the city and the home of a good part of the city's population. B y the end of the Republican period, nearly 1 million, or about onefifth, of the city's people lived in shantytowns. Overall, as far as daily life was concerned, Shanghai can be seen as a honeycomb consisting of numerous small cells—the compact, even crowded, and multifunctional neighborhoods—where people conducted most of their daily activities. For most people these were carried out in an area that at most stretched just a few blocks from their home. Almost all daily needs could be met within walking distance. Public transportation was utilized mainly for commuting to work. Taking a bus to go shopping or for other purposes was seen as a significant event. Of course, the living

Introduction

/

15

quarters of shopkeepers in the neighborhood served as workplace too, not unlike the peasant's home and farm rolled into one. Also, most children went to school within a few blocks of their home or even in the same alley. The city therefore was fragmented into numerous small communities wherein a life of moderate comfort could be obtained and maintained without venturing into the outside world—just a few blocks away. To many residents the few blocks around their homes were what the " c i t y " meant to them, and most of the city's much publicized modern amenities were quite irrelevant to their daily lives. However, this provincial or urban-village type of lifestyle, so to speak, did not prevent Shanghainese from being viewed, in the eyes of Chinese outside the city, as the most cosmopolitan and urbanized people of China. A n old Shanghailander (an old-fashioned way of saying "a person of Shanghai," one that often refers to Shanghai's Westerners) could fastidiously point out the distinctions between a person from the so-called "higher corner" (or shang zhi jiao, referring to the city's fine neighborhoods) and a person from the "lower corner" (or xia zhi jiao, referring to the city's poor neighborhoods), but such distinctions were too subtle for non-Shanghainese. For them, all Shanghainese seemed to share, among other things, a most distinctive characteristic that one needed to take precautions against: astuteness. This characteristic was, on one hand, associated with being calculating, fastidious, quick-witted, and, if necessary, with benefiting oneself at the expense of others. On the other hand, it was not necessarily associated with bargaining over trivial matters, and certainly not with being niggardly. Rather, it implied a style or a boldness of vision in life to have the daring, as a Chinese saying put it, to look to the long term by "casting away gold like throwing out dirt" (zhi jin ru tu). In the twentieth century, all across China "Shanghainese" and "astuteness" became inseparable like body and shadow. It is more meaningful, and perhaps also less conjectural, to explore the origin of any stereotype than to discuss its legitimacy. In looking at the source of this stereotype—and perhaps all the characteristics of Shanghai's people mentioned above—one inevitably encounters a powerful fountainhead, namely, commerce. One may imagine a "typical" Shanghainese, as envisioned by many Chinese, to be rather like Shakespeare's merchant of Venice but with a breadth of spirit and "merchants' ways" that were veiled with the kind of sophistication tempered only by living in an extremely cosmopolitan and complex city. In other words, Shanghainese were far from philistine, and their "merchant character" was often implicit

16

/

Introduction

and diluted with the higher culture that the city generally represented. Nonetheless, underneath it all nothing could change the fact that the essence of being "Shanghainese" derived from commerce. 39 As is now common knowledge in the field of Chinese history, commerce and commercial culture were age-old and widespread phenomena in China; in particular, late imperial China witnessed vigorous commercialization in the lower Yangzi delta region, of which Shanghai was a part. Nevertheless, modern Shanghai possessed a more densely clotted and highly localized commercial culture than the nation had ever seen before. Here in a riverside city of little more than a dozen square miles gathered millions of people; each came cherishing a dream, each ventured into this strange land in search of survival or success; and in the process each had become a merchant of a sort. Here, in some way everybody was a commodity and everything was for sale: from the flesh and blood of a newly arrived country girl to the muscle of a simple coolie, from auspicious words uttered by a street urchin to monopolistic protection provided by notorious gangsters, from missing national art treasures to recycled opium dregs, and so on. Such commercialization may well be an inevitable part of modernity—it was certainly not seen as too extravagant in the capitalist West during the Industrial Revolution—but it was novel and peculiar to most Chinese in the early twentieth century. It was therefore all too natural that the Chinese perceived their compatriots in Shanghai as a group of anomalous people immersed in a distinctively commerce-derived culture that somehow differed from the rest of the country; hence they looked askance at Shanghainese. One is easily tempted to look for Shanghai's commercial culture in the city's bustling, prosperous commercial centers that featured modern, multicolored business mansions, department stores, entertainment centers, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and ever-changing neon lights and commercial advertisements of all sorts. 40 All of these are certainly important components of commerce and commercial culture, and all are present in modern cities elsewhere. This study, however, chooses to focus on something less conventional but more characteristic of a Chinese city with a unique commercial culture rooted in everyday life: the commerce in the back alleys where most people lived. The purpose of this focus is to witness the human drama of everyday life. Here we see how commerce was not limited to just the city's commercial districts but rather was an everyday matter carried out in the narrow paths between residential houses, at the back doors of common households, in people's living rooms, and even in the inner chambers of ordinary homes. It was in this extraordinary mixture of residence

Introduction

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17

and commerce that a vibrant commercial culture was born: commerce was made such a vital part of life that, we may say, one had to commend one's soul to it in order to survive.

How "China-Centered"

Are We?

In the half century since the end of World War II, Western scholarship on the history of late imperial and modern China has in a broad sense moved toward a "China-centered" approach that has gradually replaced, or in some ways remedied, the "Western-impact/China-response" model. 41 This movement has been stimulated by a younger generation of researchers well trained in the Chinese language, and by political changes in China since the late 1970s that have allowed a better research environment, including access to archival materials and local records previously closed to researchers and the possibility of field studies. The more profound reason, of course, has to do with a change in philosophy: the internal dynamics and logic of a non-Western nation have come to be seen as a more powerful force than a strong but external impact. Applying this outlook to modern Chinese history, scholars have convincingly demonstrated that in some dimensions of Chinese life traditional social and institutional practices continued into the modern era, that modernity in China in some respects had Chinese roots and was not something entirely transplanted from the outside, that some social and political aspects of late imperial China were comparable to those of "early modern" Europe, that the Communist revolution may have carried out programs that had started a century earlier, 42 and so on. Overall, discontinuities and stimulus from the West have come to be seen as less important than the continuation of Chinese tradition and indigenous development. The history of modern Shanghai has been taken as a showcase to demonstrate both perspectives. For decades under the "impact-response" model, the city was seen as the "key to modern China," as representing the path that the rest of China should have taken. 43 This view has been much modified by more recent scholarship, but to see Shanghai as an unusually important city (whether " k e y " or not) remains unquestioned. This surely is one of the reasons for the boom in Shanghai studies in recent decades. Little explanation is required for the view that a history of the Chinese labor movement, a history of the Chinese bourgeoisie, or a history of modern Chinese literature, among many other subjects, would be unthinkable without research on Shanghai. 44 Although modern Shanghai was far from being firmly in the grip of

18

/

Introduction

Westernization—as its image of "China's most Westernized city" often conveys—an awareness of the Chinese character of the city should not lead to underestimation of Western influences. In fact, the old "impactresponse" model is perhaps more relevant in Shanghai than in any other place in the nation. Most of the changes that occurred in the city after 1843 (when Shanghai was opened as a treaty port) were an obvious consequence of the Western impact or were associated with the West. Indeed, the persistence of tradition in the life of the people of Shanghai is only more striking if we are fully aware that such continuity existed despite the formidable forces that worked to cut Shanghai off totally from the past. In other words, an underestimation of the Western influence on the city—something that a "China-centered" approach could easily lead to—would not only introduce a bias that is opposite on the surface but similar in nature to that of "Western impact," but also prevent us from full appreciation of the tenacity of Chinese traditionalism. Nowadays an emphasis (or overemphasis, as critics would say) on the Western impact on modern China is vulnerable to criticism—if it is not seen as too hackneyed even to be worth criticizing. But, ironically, the new breed of China-centered studies may not be immune from the dangers of a Euro-centered bias. In analyzing a historical phenomenon in China by examining it from "within" (which is what the China-centered approach attempts), we must choose whether to view that phenomenon as something essentially Chinese in a Chinese context or perspective, or to view it as a Chinese counterpart of things Western. The latter has the obvious merit of putting Chinese history in comparative perspective and, for a practical purpose, making things Chinese easier to understand. One may also add that, in the final analysis, all human societies share something in common; thus a counterpart-hunting approach is not altogether inappropriate. However, such an approach runs the risk of conceptualizing Chinese history based on Western experience or of distorting it to fit Westernderived theoretical models. In analyzing what he has called "the paradigmatic crisis in Chinese studies" (in particular, in social and economic history), Philip Huang points out: " O u r field has far too long borrowed analytical concepts entirely from Western-derived schemes, attempting in one way or another to force Chinese history into the classic model of Smith and Marx." 4 5 Indiscriminately applying Western models to Chinese realities encompassed Chinese Communist orthodoxy that had long declared Marxism to be a theory that "fits well everywhere" ( f a n g zhi sihai er jie zhun). Regardless, the counterpart-hunting approach in the field of Chinese history could fall back into the trap of the much criticized Euro-

Introduction

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19

centered perspective on Chinese history, although this time the trap would be better hidden and, consequently, more dangerous. These thoughts occurred to me as I tried to employ some frequently applied analytical concepts in the field, some of which seem inevitable tools in m y research on neighborhood life in Republican Shanghai. I found the tools blunt and unable to cleanly dissect the empirical material that I have gathered in m y research. Neighborhood life is by any definition part of society. Thus with such a topic an application of the "state-society relations" approach seems almost imperative. While any research on neighborhood life cannot completely ignore that angle, such an approach produces a rather indistinct and insipid picture in which the neighborhood ("society") is largely free from governmental and political intervention. A few examples, beginning with the baojia mutual responsibility system, may make the point clearer. The Chinese state had a long tradition, or at least a consistent intention, of exerting control down to the urban neighborhood. The baojia system was the most notable, institutionalized, and protracted effort in this regard. The system can be traced back to at least the Song period ( 9 6 0 - 1 2 7 9 ) . In the Qing ( 1 6 4 4 - 1 9 1 1 ) its importance was frequently emphasized by the imperial court, and the system was refined to an unprecedented degree of sophistication. Nevertheless, in all accounts the baojia turned out to be more an intention of the state rather than a reality in society; it existed largely on paper or was more a matter of form than substance. Even at its zenith in the Qing, it was far from being completely carried out nationwide. Later, the Nationalist government tried to reestablish the baojia system but achieved no more success than its Qing predecessor. In Shanghai, the regime only followed the same track of drawing up the blueprints with much fanfare, but never really got the institution built. The only time that Shanghai residents felt political control from the above was during the Japanese occupation, when a wartime baojia system was indeed enforced. But the system was brief, incomplete, and taken as a wartime emergency measure. 46 It was not until after the Communist revolution that the people of Shanghai were, in the span of a few years ( 1 9 5 0 - 5 4 ) , incorporated into a neighborhood organization system unprecedented in Chinese history. 47 Thus, prior to the early 1950s when a three-tier system of urban neighborhood organization was built nationwide, neighborhood life was essentially free of state intervention. In the saying "Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away," one finds a reflection not only of the peasants' view of state power but of that held by the ordinary city people of Republican Shanghai. Here, the analytical model of state versus society is still useful

20

/

Introduction

in framing the picture (in the sense that it brings out the issue), but in large measure it is irrelevant to the content of the picture. One of the issues regarding state-society relations that has been the subject of lively and thought-provoking discussions in recent years involves the question of civil society and public sphere in China. Developed by the German thinker Jurgen Habermas in analyzing late-seventeenthcentury Great Britain and eighteenth-century France, the public spherecivil society construct has become a favorite analytical framework for China scholars who are interested in testing whether notions and institutions similar to those that pervaded Great Britain and France may have existed in late imperial and twentieth-century China. Such scholars often bring in the Chinese notion gong as the best available equivalent to the "public sphere." Elite and mass participation in local affairs has been interpreted as a form of local autonomy, an expression of society (in contradistinction to the state), and a harbinger of democracy: all are the essence of civil society or, to carry the argument further, signs of modernity. 48 Such arguments have achieved remarkable successes in Chinese urban history, most importantly in William Rowe's study of Hankou in the late Qing and David Strand's study of Beijing in the early Republic. Their works demonstrate the sophistication of city people (in particular, the nongovernmental elite) in dealing with various political, economic, and professional issues. M a n y practices were Chinese innovations that had developed in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century and that may bear some similarities to the European experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 49 But if we were to look for local autonomy, the expression of public views, or a sense of community in the homes of Republican Shanghai, we would be in some degree disappointed; at the very least, we would meet forms of "public sphere" and "civil society" very much unlike those in Western Europe. A typical residential neighborhood in the city was a walled and gated compound consisting of several rows of identical attached houses. Each house was, more often than not, subdivided, with its rooms rented to different families, many of which lived under the same roof for decades. Living cheek by jowl with one's neighbors did not create a strong sense of community, contrary to what one might expect. There was no regular or usual neighborhood organization like the chokai (neighborhood associations) that flourished in Japan in the same period. 50 Occasionally, tenant committees cropped up in Shanghai, representing residents fighting rent increases or renovation plans (that would force residents to move out). These committees were loosely organized, occasional and temporary in na-

Introduction

/

21

ture, formed by a few volunteers, and only lukewarmly supported by those who had an interest in the negotiations; often they ended in failure. Of course, neighbors were not totally alienated from each other. News and gossip were circulated and spread among neighbors through casual chatting at alleyway corners, in daily morning shopping at a neighborhood food market, in the "enjoying the cool" summer-evening gatherings, or at the hot water service and snack store combination that could be found in most residential neighborhoods. Love affairs and marriages among neighbors were uncommon. Disputes among neighbors over trivial matters, however, were frequent, and sometimes physical fights broke out, but more serious violence was rare and disputes seldom found their way into a court of law. Serious disputes were almost always mediated by neighbors, although no formal institution for that purpose existed prior to the Communist revolution. Scholars are now well aware—or should be—that our knowledge of the public sphere in China is still limited. 51 This limitation springs from our incomplete, and in some areas superficial, knowledge of the warp and weft of everyday life in China. We need a more detailed and nuanced picture of the life of the ordinary people before we can say that any theoretical construct has meaningfully framed the nature of Chinese history.

CHAPTER

1

Going to Shanghai

The writer A l d o u s H u x l e y ( 1 8 9 4 - 1 9 6 3 ) , w h o traveled the world extensively, exclaimed in 1926 that none of the cities he had ever seen so overw h e l m i n g l y impressed him with its teeming h u m a n i t y as Shanghai. "In no city, West and East," H u x l e y wrote, "have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life. Old Shanghai is Bergson's elan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is Life itself." 1 This spirited life H u x l e y observed in the Chinese section of the city was just part, perhaps the less vigorous part, of modern Shanghai, a city that in the span of a cent u r y grew from a muddy town on the Huangpu River to a booming metropolis of 5 million people. T h e city drew its inhabitants from all over the country (indeed, all over the world) and from of all walks of life; most were peasants w h o flocked to the city in pursuit of the dream of a better life. Like m a n y phenomena in modern China, modern Shanghai's birth was attended by the West. This was not merely in the sense that the modern city grew out of the treaty port classification imposed by the West, but that its origins lay in a somewhat bizarre system, in which a settlement deliberately designated for the British ended b y being inhabited overwhelmingly by Chinese, w h o lived side by side with foreigners of all stripes. It was precisely this unexpected and unintended mixture that eventually turned Shanghai into the single most cosmopolitan city of China. From Segregation

to Mixed

Residence

THE BIRTH OF A CITY

Shanghai has been the largest metropolis in twentieth-century China, and one of the five or six biggest cities in the world. Its actual area, however, was small in the middle of this century: the city proper (i.e., urban districts, 2

5

26

/

In Search of an Urban

Identity

excluding rural counties under the Shanghai municipality) was 3 1 . 8 square miles (82.4 square kilometers), and the main part of the city, the former foreign concessions where modern Shanghai arose, was barely 1 3 square miles (33 square kilometers). The core of the city virtually coincided with the 1848 boundaries of the former British Settlement, an area of about 470 acres (.7 square mile). 2 In Shanghai's heyday in the Republican period, if one walked from Nanking Road or the B u n d — t h e prosperous commercial heart of downtown Shanghai—in any direction for a distance of about 5 miles, one would find oneself in the midst of fields of cotton and rice. If one departed from the Bund by ferry and crossed the Huangpu R i v e r — a trip of less than ten minutes—one would land in an almost untouched, traditional bucolic setting. 3 Thanks to the more than two decades of rigorous research on the commercialization of Ming-Qing China, especially in Jiangnan and the lower Yangzi delta region, nowadays few scholars would still say that pre-treatyport Shanghai was but a fishing village. 4 Early in the nineteenth century, the walled town of Shanghai was ranked as a so-called third-class county seat. This placed it under the provincial capital of Nanjing and the prefectural capital of Songjiang, but still accorded it some prominence for its commercial prosperity, based primarily on a booming cotton trade in the Qing period. However, the northern outskirts of the city, where the future International Settlement and the French Concession were to be located, was truly rural in November 1 8 4 5 when Gong Mujiu, the Shanghai Daotai, or circuit intendant, assigned the first piece of land there to the British: the landscape was dominated by cotton and rice fields, uncultivated fields of reeds, and winding footpaths for towing boats along the waterways. 5 What was to become the famous Bund was then just one of the footpaths near the waterfront at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek. The walled county town, in spite of its prosperity before the mid-nineteenth century, formed only a small portion of modern Shanghai, about one-twentieth of Shanghai proper in the Republican period. In that sense, the modern city of Shanghai did spring from obscure rural origins. In population, too, Shanghai grew from an insignificant beginning. The population of all of Shanghai county reportedly reached 540,000 in the mid-nineteenth century, about half of whom lived in the walled county seat and its immediate outskirts and the rest in villages and small towns scattered throughout the county. The northern suburbs of the town, where the International Settlement later appeared, had merely five hundred in-

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habitants. The population there was so sparse and considered so insignificant that contemporary surveys of Shanghai simply ignored it.6 However, half a century later, the population in this part of the city had skyrocketed to half a million residents. Another half century later, the population of Shanghai reached more than 5.45 million. In other words, Shanghai experienced a tenfold growth of population in a span of a century. Equally significant was the tremendous concentration of the population: the overwhelming majority were not dispersed throughout old Shanghai county, but densely packed into what had previously been the northern suburb of the county seat. This was one of the world's most densely populated places: average population per square kilometer was 43,570 in 1930, 50,032 in 1 9 3 5 , and 76,880 in 1 9 4 0 - 4 2 . 7 B y the mid-nineteenth century, Shanghai had exceeded Guangzhou in population and become China's leading treaty port. 8 The rapid growth of Shanghai could be measured by economic data such as shipping volume in and out of the port of Shanghai. In 1844, the first year after the port was open, a total of 44 foreign ships (together carrying 8,584 tons) entered Shanghai; in 1849 a total of 1 3 3 ships (52,574 tons) entered; and in 1 8 6 3 a total of 3,400 foreign ships (964,309 tons) entered, and a total of 3,547 foreign ships (996,890 tons) departed. The staples of this busy trade were (among imports) opium and (among exports) tea and silk. 9 The dynamic of development in modern Shanghai fundamentally diverged from that in traditional Chinese cities. Scholars in China view the development and prosperity of modern Shanghai as a result of Western imperialism and the exploitation of the hinterland by the treaty port. 10 In the final analysis, such a view is not substantially different from the Western interpretation of Shanghai as a proud product of Western sophistication or as a city literally built on the notorious opium trade. 1 1 Putting moral concerns aside, views on both sides of the Pacific share the common ground that the city was nurtured by the commercial vigor and entrepreneurship brought by the West. Although Shanghai had been a busy commercial center prior to its opening to the West, the new dynamic brought by the Westerners meant that traditional commerce, such as the cotton trade, was largely irrelevant to the modern development of Shanghai. The composition of the people of modern Shanghai also differs from that of the old city. Researchers have shown that pre-treaty-port Shanghai was by no means a city inhabited only by local people. For instance, the role in the city's commercial life played by so-called guest merchants (keshang)—who

came from a variety of places ranging from the southern

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provinces of Guangdong and Fujian to Anhui in the Yangzi River valley and the provinces of north China—was vitally important. 12 Still, the population of Shanghai, like that of other county seats, was overwhelmingly local. In contrast, the great majority of the inhabitants of modern Shanghai came from elsewhere. From the late nineteenth century to the midtwentieth century, immigrants consistently made up about 80 percent of the city's population. 13 So here we have a city that was new in three basic senses: it sprang from pastoral farmlands, but quickly overshadowed the old walled county town; its population consisted overwhelmingly of newly arrived immigrants; and it was spiritually stimulated and driven by Western commercial values and vigor, something that was novel to China. All of these changes began with a system of residential segregation.

THE FOREIGN

SETTLEMENTS

The foreign concessions, the focus of growth in modern Shanghai, were originally designed in 1 8 4 5 to be settlements reserved exclusively for Westerners. Except for a handful of farmers already living there at the time the settlement was created, Chinese were banned from purchasing and renting land within the boundaries of the settlement, either for residential or commercial purposes. The segregation was terminated in 1 8 5 4 and thereafter could not be restored. Except for a few years during the Pacific War, the foreign population in Shanghai had never exceeded 3 percent of the city's total population. 14 The residents of Shanghai's foreign settlements (namely, the International Settlement and the French Concession) were overwhelmingly Chinese. Shanghai, in spite of its heavy foreign accent, remained predominately a Chinese city. There was virtually no justification in treaties for the legal status of Shanghai's foreign settlement. The only document that can be considered as possibly providing a legal basis is an agreement known as the Land Regulations, signed in 1 8 4 5 by Gong Mujiu, the Shanghai Daotai, and George Balfour (1809-94), the first British consul in Shanghai. The agreement allowed British subjects to rent property in a designated area in the northern suburb, outside the walled Chinese city. This area, later to become the core of the International Settlement, covered an area from the Bund in the east to Boundary Road (today's Henan Road) in the west, and from Lijiachang (at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek) in the north to Yangjingbang Creek (today's Yan'andong Road) in

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the south, a total area of about 830 Chinese mu (138 acres). According to the Chinese notion that "all the lands under heaven belong to the emperor" (putian zhi xia, mofei wangtu), foreigners were in theory not allowed to purchase land within the area but were permitted to permanently rent real property there. This is an early example of how the Chinese saved face while granting privileges to foreigners. 1 5 The French Concession was bounded by the walled Chinese city in the south and the newly created British Settlement in the north—as a result of a lengthy negotiation in 1849 between the French consul Louis Montigny ( 1 8 0 5 - 6 8 ) and the Shanghai Daotai, Lin Gui. 1 6 The American Settlement in Hongkou, located on the north side of Suzhou Creek about five miles northeast of the Chinese city, was more a fait accompli presented by a concentration of property purchased (or permanently rented) by the American Church Mission than an officially designated area for the Americans. As Hosea Ballou Morse ( 1 8 5 5 - 1 9 3 4 ) put it, "The American Settlement was not created, but 'just g r o w e d . ' " 1 7 In 1848, Bishop William J. Boone ( 1 8 1 1 - 6 4 ) got oral agreement from the Daotai Wu Jianzhang that Hongkou was to be an "American Settlement." The official boundary was settled in June 1 8 6 3 by the American consul George Frederick Seward ( 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 0 ) and Shanghai Daotai Huang Fang. Three months later, on September 2 1 , the British and American Settlements were formally amalgamated. The resulting concession was known (especially after 1899) as the International Settlement. Thus, by the end of the 1840s, three major powers all had settlements in Shanghai. The land regulations prohibited Chinese from renting property within the International Settlement and the French Concession. Chinese inhabitants of the area were to be gradually evacuated, and eventually the area was to become completely segregated. B y the end of the 1840s, even a casual visitor could observe that the Chinese who lived within the settlement "generally left of their free will and were liberally remunerated for their property by foreigners." These natives "were moving gradually backwards [i.e., westward] into the country, with their families, efforts, and all that appertained unto them" including their family tombs. 18 This system of segregation was not entirely imposed by the West. Rather, at the beginning, it was a mechanism that the Qing authorities adopted to limit foreign influence and minimize disputes between local people and the "barbarians." According to the Bogue (Humen) Treaty, which was signed October 8 , 1 8 4 3 , as a supplement to the Treaty of Nanjing, local Chinese authorities in concert with the British consul in the five

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treaty ports of China were to designate a limited zone within which foreigners could travel, as well as an area where British subjects could reside.19 This was considered a victory by the Qing, as can be seen from the correspondence between Qiying (1790-1858), the imperial commissioner who negotiated and signed the treaty, and Emperor Daoguang (1782-1850). Qiying reported to the emperor that, by signing the supplemental treaty, he had successfully arranged that in the treaty ports "the boundaries of an area should be designated which foreigners are not allowed to exceed" (yidingjiezhi, buxu yuyue). The Chinese version of the Bogue Treaty actually carried this wording, but the tone was not clearly reflected in the English version. 20 The Qing rulers, by confining the "barbarians" to an officially designated special zone, apparently hoped to resurrect the old Canton system, that is, a system that strictly confined foreigners to a segregated zone in the treaty ports. 21 Locally, in his first announcement of the opening of Shanghai to foreign trade dated November 1 4 , 1 8 4 3 , George Balfour, the British consul in Shanghai, informed the British subjects in the city that "arrangements are in process for selecting a suitable site for dwelling and store-house for settling by assay." 22 In order to ensure that things went smoothly, the Daotai or one of his officers always went in person to Chinese landowners to negotiate the sale of land to the foreigners. This proved a difficult task. Frequently, the owners simply refused to "rent." In one case, an old lady "went so far in her opposition to all proposed bargains, that, after pouring on the head of the party a torrent of colloquial Billingsgate, she actually . . . spat in the Taotai's face and declared that she would never sell her patrimony to foreign devils!" 2 3 Such things would not have happened to a huiguan (guilds) merchant who came from another part of the country. Also, it was never a problem for Chinese "guest merchants" to establish guild houses in the walled city. For the British, however, this was the foremost difficulty that they encountered in Shanghai. At the beginning, Balfour could not even find a house for the consulate.24 The intention of the Chinese officials was clear: to keep the foreigners out of the city. The British finally decided to located themselves in the northern suburbs and asked the Daotai to designate an area there as a segregated British settlement. This dovetailed with the mandarin's intentions. For a decade after 1845 this segregation continued without much difficulty. In 1848, with the permission of the Manchu Daotai Lin Gui, the British Settlement was expanded westward to Nichengbang (lit., Muddy Town Creek; later filled in and transformed into Tibet Road) and northward

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to the southern bank of Suzhou Creek. This rural area was soon inhabited by an increasing number of foreigners, as the following statistics on the foreign population in Shanghai show: 25 1844

1845

1846

1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

50

90

120

134

159

175

210

265

The total population in the settlements in 1852 was about 500. This means that foreigners were gradually coming to outnumber the local Chinese residents.26 This was the dawn of what was to become a great city, although few at that time would have predicted greatness for Shanghai. 27 For the Western adventurers in Shanghai, life was enjoyable and placid. By 1850, a public park, a race course, and amateur theater clubs were founded in the foreign community. O n summer evenings, Westerners driving ox carts relaxed in the breeze on the broad waterfront of the Bund, the business center of the settlement and site of much new construction. 28 A new term, "bunders," was coined to refer to these Westerners, and the Bund was often poetically associated with, in the words of an insider, "its gossip, its cool evening breezes, its ever-changing outlook, its pleasant promenades, its reminiscences of valued friendships, its pensive regrets." 29 The availability of a variety of wild game (mainly birds) in the region and the peaceful nature of the local people made hunting a real pleasure for the Europeans. 30 Shanghai was, as a British botanist who traveled extensively in China at that time exclaimed, "one vast beautiful garden, by far the richest which I have seen in China." 3 1 This pastoral, even romantic, life was perhaps typical of what Western sojourners enjoyed in Asia. Similar lifestyles could be found in the early colonial history of other Asian cities such as Calcutta and Yokohama. But the foreigners in Shanghai would soon face an unexpected event that would dramatically bring to an end the tranquillity of their life and, much more important historically, change the course of the development of the city.

T H E E N D OF R E S I D E N T I A L

SEGREGATION

On the morning of September 7,1853, an uprising organized by the Small Swords, a Fujian-based secret society headed by the Cantonese vagrant Liu Lichuan (1820 - c a . 1855), killed the Shanghai county magistrate at the site

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of an ongoing annual ceremony at the city's Confucian temple. 32 The rebels then took the county seat and declared the establishment of the "State of Great M i n g " (Da Ming Guo). This event was the beginning of seventeen months of warfare in Shanghai and its vicinity. Two days after their success in Shanghai, the rebels marched to attack other county towns near Shanghai. In ten days, Baoshan, Nanhui, Chuansha, and Qingpu were under the control of the Small Swords. Jiading, a county seat twentyfive miles northwest of Shanghai, was occupied by the rebels prior to the Shanghai war. In the turmoil of the fighting, thousands of refugees, mostly from the county town of Shanghai but also from other occupied towns, poured into the foreign settlements, which were within walking distance of the war-torn city. 33 The population of the combined British and American Settlements jumped from 500 in 1 8 5 3 to more than 20,000 in 1855. These refugees encountered two different attitudes in the settlements. Foreign merchants saw them as an opportunity to make a fortune: the quickest way to get rich was to build dwellings for the refugees. Rows of simply constructed, single-story wooden houses appeared literally overnight along the Bund, in the northwest part of the British Settlement, as well as on the banks of Yangjingbang, the creek that separated the British and French settlements. 34 M a n y of the refugees were well-off merchants and landlords who could afford the prices that the foreigners asked. 35 Another group of Westerners, however, was more concerned about the comfort and safety of the foreign community. This group was represented by the British consul, Sir Rutherford Alcock ( 1 8 0 9 - 9 7 ) , who in January 1 8 5 5 , after consulting the Shanghai Daotai, ordered "the removal of objectionable natives and demolition of objectionable tenements." Alcock's order left thousands of Chinese homeless in the bitter cold of winter. 36 This action sparked some antiforeign sentiment among the Chinese, but from the viewpoint of the British authorities, such a move seemed necessary if the idea of segregation from the Chinese was to be preserved. Shortly after the rebellion, the British Settlement, according to one observation, had been transformed from "a purely foreign reservation" into a "native Alsatia, the southern portion being blocked with abominably overcrowded and filthy hovels, fraught with the danger of fire and pestilence, rife with brothels, opium shops, and gambling dens." 3 7 The debate over whether to continue accepting Chinese refugees was therefore a burning topic in the foreign community. The foreign settlement was at a crossroad. But no one could have predicted the impact that the ultimate decision would have on the fate of the city. Thus, when an out-

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spoken British merchant approached Alcock to express his views, he was quite unaware that his words would result in a milestone for the city: No doubt your anticipations of future evil have a certain foundation, and, indeed, may be correct enough, though something may be urged on the other side as to the advantages of having the Chinese mingled with us, and departing from the old Canton system of isolation; but, upon the whole, I agree with you. The day will probably come when those who then may be here will see abundant cause to regret what is now being done, in letting and subletting to Chinese. But in what way am I and my brother landholders and speculators concerned in this ? You, as H.M.'s Consul, are bound to look to national and permanent interests—that is your business; but it is my business to make a fortune with the least possible loss of time, by letting my land to Chinese, and building for them at thirty or forty percent interest, if that is the best thing I can do with my money. In two or three years at farthest, I hope to realize a fortune and get away; and what can it matter to me if all Shanghae [Shanghai] disappear afterward in fire or flood? You must not expect men in my situation to condemn themselves to years of prolonged exile in an unhealthy climate for the benefit of posterity. We are money-making, practical men. Our business is to make money, as much and as fast as we can; and for this end, all modes and means are good which the law permits.38 The view expressed here was no doubt representative of the majority of foreign merchants in Shanghai. Alcock was "quite convinced" by this lecture and the warning that he "was losing time in any efforts to stem the tide of land-jobbing and house-building for Chinese tenants"; thus he ended his struggle to keep the Chinese out of the settlement. 39 It is doubtful that even if the British authorities had continued to forbid renting houses to Chinese tenants, they would have been able to stem the tide of refugees flooding the foreign settlement. As Alcock admitted, to insist on a purely foreign settlement in Shanghai under these circumstances was "too evidently hopeless." 40 The official abandonment of segregation by the British consul, who was the most influential if not the most authoritative leader in Shanghai's foreign community, cleared the road for creating a mixed settlement of Chinese and foreign residents. In this regard, the combination of the Small Sword Uprising and Alcock's decision was a turning point in the development of Shanghai. This decision was soon legalized, at least from the viewpoint of the Western powers. In July 1854, Alcock, together with the American consul, Robert C. Murphy, and the French consul, B. Edan, signed a new set of Land Regulations. Although this document was never approved or signed

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by the Chinese authorities, it was nevertheless proclaimed as a revision of the 1845 Land Regulations, and on July 1 1 it was passed in a public meeting of foreign residents in the settlement. After that, the Land Regulations served as the fundamental law, or "constitution," for Shanghai's foreign settlement until the settlement was abolished in 1943. 4 1 A number of important institutions set up by this law dominated the fate of Shanghai for almost a century. In September 1869, the Land Regulations were revised and approved by the European envoys in Beijing to create the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC, which replaced the former Executive Committee of the settlement),42 which would govern the International Settlement until 1943. The 1869 Land Regulations also served as the legal basis of the merger of the British Settlement and American Settlement, although for practical reasons (such as policing) the latter already had been under the administration of the British Settlement since September 1863. Officially, the French insisted on having a separate concession in Shanghai. The French Concession was therefore governed by a separate municipal council headed by the French consul-general and was not subject to the Land Regulations. In reality, however, much of the administration of the French Concession duplicated the regulations and practices of the International Settlement. The new regulations also deleted the segregation provision of the 1845 regulations, although officially Chinese were still not allowed to acquire land in their own name within the Settlement. At this stage the Chinese government was still unwilling to see mixed residence in Shanghai. According to a proclamation issued by Daotai Lan Weiwen in 1855, "No Chinese subject can acquire land, or rent, or erect buildings, within the Foreign Settlement, without first having obtained an authority under official seal from the local Authority, sanctioned by the Consuls of the three Treaty Powers." 43 When the foreign consuls wrote a letter asking the Daotai to take care of health and moral conditions in the settlement, the Daotai responded with a complaint rather than a solution: "According to the original land regulations, native domicile was interdicted within the settlement; now, however, tenements were built by foreigners to accommodate natives, regardless even of the risk incurred in harbouring people of bad character indiscriminately, and of the difficulties this unregulated state of affairs would entail in criminal cases." 44 Despite the opposition of the Daotai, by the late 1850s there was no doubt that the concessions were no longer a reserved area for foreign residents, but rather were a special district mostly populated by Chinese but governed by Europeans. The suppression of the Small Sword rebellion in

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1 8 5 5 did not end population mobility into the foreign settlement. The Taiping Rebellion, which was most violent and destructive in Jiangnan, continued to drive refugees to Shanghai. In 1 8 6 0 - 6 2 , the Taipings several times attempted to seize Shanghai; this created even more panic among the people of the region, and, consequently, refugees continued to pour into Shanghai's foreign concessions for protection. B y 1865, the population of the British-American settlement had increased to 92,884. A t the same time, almost 50,000 Chinese moved into the French Concession. B y the end of the Taiping Rebellion, well over 1 1 0 , 0 0 0 Chinese had moved into the foreign settlements. 45

From the "Five Lakes and Four

Seas"

The opening of Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century, first to "barbaric" foreigners and then to a great variety of Chinese refugees from outside the Shanghai area, represented the continuation of a local tradition of easy acceptance of outsiders. Traditional Chinese writers, including the compilers of local gazetteers (fangzhi), often described the people of Jiangnan as rouruo (soft and weak). 46 The tradition of ready acceptance of outsiders was seen as part of this "soft and weak" nature. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Shanghai was a hot spot in Sino-foreign relations, the Qing court frequently cautioned officials to beware of the "soft and weak" nature of the Shanghai folk when dealing with "barbarian affairs" (t/iwu).47 Lin Y u tang ( 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 7 6 ) once contrasted the "simple thinking and hard living" northern Chinese and the "progressive and quick-tempered" southerners with the people of Jiangnan, who were, Lin claimed, "inured to ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde, loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic women, fed on birds'-nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in belles-lettres, and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma before the lifted fist descends." 48 Such views added up to a stereotype, of course, and in any case might have applied more to the upper classes than to working people, but, like many stereotypes, there was some truth to these words. There was also a more charitable interpretation of the "soft and weak" nature of the people of Shanghai that emphasized their virtues of openness, amiability, tolerance, flexibility, and so on. 49 The commercial boom of Shanghai in the Qing period was initially led by the "guest merchants," who came from nearby places as well as from remote provinces to conduct business in Shanghai. The influence of these merchants, particularly those

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of Guangdong and Fujian, was strong prior to the treaty-port era. Apparently, prosperity created by the "guest merchants" eventually led to a proclivity to value commerce and easily accept outsiders and outside influences. Such a tendency was, even by the modest standards of the time, viewed as a departure from orthodoxy and, therefore, was condemned as evil. 50 But it was precisely because of this heterodoxy that Shanghai rose above the horizon of a vast conservatism and became a great, modern city. FOREIGN

ADVENTURERS

This tradition of openness was even more characteristic of Shanghai during the treaty-port era. B y the late nineteenth century, Shanghai was an exceptional place where the natives welcomed sojourners, while elsewhere in the country the normal pattern was the reverse. A s an indicator of its openness, a variety of Chinese dialects could be heard in the streets and neighborhoods of the city; everyone lived side by side, seemingly without fear of discrimination. Indeed, Shanghai seemed most receptive to those who spoke a Western language, because people who spoke a foreign tongue could, as a late-nineteenth-century poem put it, "do as they please." 5 1 A t the beginning of the treaty-port period some Westerners had apparently bought into the stereotype of the " s o f t " Shanghainese. A British Royal Navy commander who traveled extensively along the China coast and lived there for five years immediately after 1 8 4 2 wrote: The English merchant at Canton is almost a prisoner in his house; he has only a few streets open to him for the required recreation, even for the benefit of exercise, and then with the probability of insult. Experience has taught him that even his own house may be a very unsafe refuge from a furious and ignorant mob; any excitement, from whatever cause it originates, is sure to vent itself on the unfortunate foreigners, and, perhaps, bring the building about his ears with very small chance of redress. On the other hand[,] at Shanghae [Shanghai], he is surrounded by a peaceable and hospitable community, where crime is a matter of such rare occurrence, that His Excellency Kun Mukiu [Gong Mujiu], the civil governor, said in my presence that, during his government of so large a population, which had lasted, I believe, nine years, one execution only had taken place.. . . Besides the absence of crime in Shanghae, the city is always open to the foreigner equally with the native; and I have had several years' experience to ground my statement on, that insults or annoyance, of every kind, are less frequent to strangers than in any part of the world. 52 Although the rise of modern Shanghai must be explained from a multifaceted analysis—including the favorable geographical location of the city,

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sitting as it does at the middle of the nation's lengthy coastline facing the Pacific to the east and the Yangzi Valley to the west—the " s o f t " nature of the Shanghainese no doubt played an important role. To put this softness into a broader and perhaps philosophical perspective, one may relate it to the value of liberalism. A Chinese author who tried to analyze the nature of the people of Shanghai from a historical perspective argued that the "strongest psychological character of Shanghai civilization was tolerance and coexistence based on individual freedom." 5 3 Be that as it may, unquestionably liberalism contributed to the cosmopolitanism of the city. In few Asian cities could foreigners feel as at home as in modern Shanghai. B y the twentieth century, "Shanghai became a legend. No world cruise was complete without a stop in the city. Its name evoked mystery, adventure and license of every form." 5 4 Going to Shanghai was a classic adventure for Westerners and a solution for many who had problems in their homeland. Shanghai was thus a city of dreams and a city of escape. In the Republican period, its foreign population included people from more than twenty European nations, a sizable community of Japanese, Indians, Vietnamese, and Koreans, and citizens from Middle Eastern and South American nations—as well as the nationless. 55 The largest foreign contingents were, of course, the British, the Americans, and the French, whose respective concessions formed the heart of the city. The European-style office buildings on the Bund and the sumptuous and secluded residences on the west side of the city were constant reminders of the foreigners' status as masters of the city. B y the twentieth century, despite the decline of the British Empire, old Shanghai residents still put the British ahead of other Western nationals, and even ahead of all other Anglophones: witness the word order in the term "British-American people" (YingMeiren). 56 Despite whatever privilege the sentiment might have accorded the British, all foreigners in Shanghai had reason to feel at home. "To be a Shanghailander—whether British or American, whether stateless Jew or Russian refugee—had always seemed an honoured privilege. Shanghai was a city of homes, not a city of transients. Young people might in the first instance be posted by a trading house to work there for a few years, but often as the moment of transfer approached, they begged to stay. People of every nationality settled there, married, raised children." 5 7 The following missionary report tells of a vivid street scene in the downtown area in 1909: Shanghai, with its mixture of races, with its national antipathies and jealousies, is indeed one of the most attractive but strangest towns in

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the whole world. Every race meets there; and as one wanders down the Nanking Road, one never tires of watching the nationalities which throng that thoroughfare. There walks a tall bearded Russian, a fat German, jostling perhaps a tiny Japanese officer, whose whole air shows that he regards himself as a member of the conquering race that has checkmated the vast power of Europe; there are sleek Chinese in Western carriages, and there are thin Americans in Eastern rickshas; the motorcycle rushes past, nearly colliding with a closely curtained chair bearing a Chinese lady of rank, or a splendid Indian in a yellow silk coat is struck in the face by the hat of a Frenchman, who finds the pavements of Shanghai too narrow for his sweeping salute; one hears guttural German alternating with Cockney slang; Parisian toilettes are seen next to half-naked coolies; a couple of sailors on a tandem cycle almost upset two Japanese beauties as they shuffle along with their toes turned in; a grey-gowned Buddhist priest elbows a bearded Roman missionary; a Russian shop where patriotism rather than love of gain induces the owners to conceal the nature of their wares by employing the Russian alphabet overhead, stands opposite a Japanese shop which, in not too perfect English, assures the wide world that their heads can be cut cheaply.58 In later years, the cultural shock suggested in this report became attenuated, but the cosmopolitanism of the city lasted well into the 1940s. 5 9 Not all Westerners played the role of "master" of the city. About 25,000 to 50,000 White Russian émigrés arrived in Shanghai in the Republican period. 60 Although most of them were poor—Russians were the only Westerners to include a sizable number of prostitutes and beggars—the businesses they opened along Avenue Joffre (now Huaihaizhong Road) in the French Concession helped create an elegant European atmosphere on the street. 61 The concentration of Japanese in North Sichuan Road in Hongkou caused the area to be known as Little Tokyo. The city's traffic was largely directed by Sikh policemen, nicknamed "Turbaned Number Three" or "Number Three Redhead" (hongtou asan), whose presence in the streets became a feature of the city. 62 The success of Jewish merchants in Shanghai is an often-told story. Real estate magnates such as the Sassoons and Silas Hardoon ( 1 8 4 7 - 1 9 3 1 ) contributed to the "get-rich quick" reputation of Shanghai, and their grand office buildings and extravagant homes were proud landmarks of the city. Partly because no visa or papers of any sort were required to enter the city, during World War II Shanghai hosted about 20,000 Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis and made the arduous journey across the hemisphere. Most of them lived in the alleyway-house (lilong, or lane) neighborhoods in Hongkou in the north-

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east section of the city. Half a century later, although practically all of the Jews had gone elsewhere (particularly to the United States), most of their former homes remained little changed and became sentimental relics for those who returned to visit. 63 Despite Shanghai's wide-open cosmopolitanism, some foreigners may well have had reason to feel that they were "strangers always," as the title of Rena Krasno's memoirs of Jewish life in wartime Shanghai suggests. Yet loneliness, or perhaps homesickness, never prevented foreigners from coming to Shanghai and making a living, if not a fortune. In the early 1930s a Shanghai writer listed the reasons foreigners of various nationalities came to the city: Shanghai's foreigners pack together in the city for the same reason our Chinese do: they could not make a living in their home country and came to Shanghai in search of a livelihood. Japanese prostitutes come to Shanghai to make a living by selling sex.64 The White Russians, who are anti-Red, came to Shanghai to make a living by begging. The overbearing British toughs came to Shanghai to make a living by running the police department. The bored Spanish came to Shanghai to make a living by playing tennis [huiliqiu]. The nationless Jews came to Shanghai to make a living in real estate. The merchants of American trust companies came to Shanghai to make a living by selling gasoline. The French, who love a life of ease, came to Shanghai to make a living by selling cosmetics. The oppressed Indian and Vietnamese came to Shanghai to make a living by working as policemen, and so on and so forth— there are just too many such cases to give a complete account of the subject.65 B y the thirties, many foreigners considered the city their permanent home (see Fig. 1). As a Britisher indicated on the eve of the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1 9 3 7 , "It is time the old idea that foreigners come to Shanghai for a few years and then go away with a fortune was abandoned. This is a place of permanent residence for most of us." 6 6 The Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1 9 3 7 , and their occupation of the whole city after the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1 9 4 1 , cast a shadow over the Western presence in the city. But it was really not until the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 that the century-long golden age of the Westerners came to a close. 67 CHINESE

IMMIGRANTS

Despite the seeming ubiquity and importance of foreigners in Shanghai, the growth of the modern city lay not in its attraction for foreigners but,

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Fig. i. This bird's-eye view of where Suzhou (Soochow) Creek joins Huangpu River was photographed in 1937. The right (i.e., southern) side of the creek is the core of the International Settlement, with Garden Park (across from the British Consulate) at the northern end of the Bund. Nanking Road is just one block out of the scene, to the right. The 350-foot-long Garden Bridge was Shanghai's first iron and concrete bridge, built in 1906-7; it is one of the symbols of modern Shanghai. Across the bridge to the north is the New Broadway Mansions, built in 1934. The area behind the mansion is Hongkou, where residential neighborhoods featured alleyway houses mixed with consulates, warehouses, and bars in the Broadway area. The second bridge in the picture is the Zhapu Road Bridge, built in 1927. The area across this bridge to the north consisted mainly of lilong neighborhoods. Courtesy of Shanghai Municipal Archive.

essentially, in its attraction for the Chinese. Ever since the end of the system of residential segregation, the overwhelming majority of the people of Shanghai had been Chinese immigrants. In the span of three-quarters of a century (from 1 8 5 5 , when the segregation ended, to 1 9 3 0 , when the city entered its heyday), the population in the core of the city, the International Settlement, had increased about fiftyfold, and about 97 percent were Chinese. 6 8 B y 1 9 3 7 and the end of the Republican period, the city's total population had increased at least tenfold, or possibly twentyfold in the city proper. 69

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The administrative area of Shanghai did not significantly expand in the century prior to 1949; rather, such rapid population growth was the result of immigration. Modern Shanghai attracted and absorbed immigrants from everywhere in the nation. From the late nineteenth century to the late 1920s, non-Shanghai natives consistently made up about 85 percent of the city's population. 70 During the Nanjing decade ( 1 9 2 7 - 3 7 ) , the percentage of non-Shanghai natives dropped slightly, possibly because after a few generations of migration some people born in Shanghai considered themselves Shanghainese and reported their native place as Shanghai. But the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1 9 3 7 , followed by the Civil War ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 9 ) , brought new tides of immigrants to the city. B y the end of the Sino-Japanese War, nonnatives still accounted for 80 percent of the population; in January 1950, the percentage of nonnatives had increased back to 85 percent. 71 Most of these immigrants came from the provinces of the lower Yangzi delta (in particular, Jiangsu and Zhejiang) and from Guangdong in southern China. In the early 1930s, the five provinces from which Shanghai drew most of its immigrants were Jiangsu (53 percent, including 20 percent of local Shanghai origin), Zhejiang (34 percent), Guangdong (5 percent), Anhui (3 percent), and Shandong (1 percent). 72 This pattern continued up to 1950. 7 3 To apply a Chinese expression, modern Shanghainese came from the "Five Lakes and Four Seas" (wuhu sihai), that is, everywhere in the nation. 74 Immigrants came to the city for their own individual reasons and purposes, and included everyone from multimillionaires who came to pursue an extravagant yet secluded lifestyle that could hardly be found in other Chinese cities, to the absolutely destitute who roamed the city's streets in search of bare survival; from political dissidents who fled to the "safety zone" of the foreign concessions, to criminals who came to join the nation's largest underground; from modern women (or flappers) who found in this city the freedom they sought, to innocent rural girls who were inveigled by labor contractors to come work in the city but who ended up being sold to brothels. Yet virtually all who came to Shanghai had a simple, shared goal: to find a better life. In the winter of 1928, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs conducted a survey of homeless people in seven public shelters. The 1 , 4 7 1 vagrants surveyed were all recent immigrants to the city, and they hailed from all eighteen provinces of China proper and from Manchuria. These people listed more than forty previous occupations, but the largest group (310) were jobless. There were 1 3 8 demobilized soldiers who were sup-

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posed to return to their home villages, but who decided to stay on in Shanghai although they had no job. In response to the question " W h y did you come to Shanghai?" 586 replied, "To look for a job." Another 354 said they came to Shanghai to look for relatives or friends. For most of these people, the purpose of visiting a relative or friend was to connect with someone who could help them find a job. Thus, virtually 64 percent of the respondents were motivated by the job opportunities to be found here. 75 This survey was echoed by a 1 9 8 9 - 9 0 survey of residents in seven neighborhoods who were immigrants in the Republican period. About 70 percent of the male interviewees gave "to look for a job" as the main reason for coming to Shanghai. In this they were successful. The percentage of employment among these immigrants increased from 46.6 before coming to Shanghai to 75.3 after arrival. The survey also found immigrants to Shanghai had a great variety of occupational backgrounds. More than half (56.4 percent)—by far the largest group—had been farmers; almost all found a job in the city, mostly in manufacturing and commerce. The remainder of those surveyed had come from diverse occupational backgrounds. This is consistent with another aspect of their background: half of the immigrants (50 percent) had come directly from the countryside, 2 1 percent from small rural towns, 1 5 . 3 percent from county seats, 1 1 percent from medium-size cities, and about 2.7 percent from large cities. 76 Shanghai's immediate "radiation zone" for attracting immigrants included its suburban rural areas and the more distant lower Yangzi delta counties. People in the nearby countryside looked upon Shanghai as a place to get ahead. "Where is the market for agricultural and handicraft products? Shanghai. Where is the place for people to seek an occupation? Shanghai." The gazetteer of Chuansha, a rural county adjacent to Shanghai, exclaimed: "Overpopulation? Move to Shanghai! Unemployment? Look for opportunities in Shanghai!" 7 7 It is probably the case that most rural immigrants came to Shanghai looking for factory work, for in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shanghai grew to be the nation's largest industrial center. 78 The recruitment of workers from nearby villages for Shanghai's industries started as early as in the 1870s. Shanghai's earliest workshops were the Western-run shipyards in the Hongkou area (along the northeast banks of the Huangpu River). 79 The shipyards at first hired skilled Cantonese workers. B y the late 1870s, as the industry grew, workers from Nanjing, Ningbo, and local villages gradually outnumbered the Guangdong workers, for the obvious reason that local residents were closer and easier (and cheaper) to recruit. But, unlike the Guangdong workers, who

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were experienced artisans, workers from Jiangnan were mostly peasants and hence started their careers in industry as apprentices. 80 A veteran worker in the machinery industry, Qian Rendao (born 1 8 8 1 ) , recalled that his grandfather was a local farmer who only had two or three mu of land planted in vegetables. Since it was difficult to support a family on such a small farm, the grandfather went to the International Settlement in search of a job and became a porter in the Hongkou dock area. Apparently he still kept his vegetable farm; thus his son (Rendao's father) as a child worked as a vegetable peddler to earn extra money to support the family. But the family had already become urban oriented. When Rendao's father grew up, he became an apprentice in the Chinese-owned Fachang Machine Factory. A f t e r serving out his apprenticeship, he entered the British-owned Xiangsheng Shipyard (Boyd and Co.) with the help of his wife's brother, Song Milong. Song also had been a vegetable farmer in his youth. He used to sell vegetables to the Fachang Machine Factory, which is how he got to know the people there; through this connection he later found a job in the factory as an apprentice. A f t e r his apprenticeship, he transferred to the Xiangsheng Shipyard in 1880 and worked as a coppersmith. His skill and performance got him quick promotions. He became a section chief a few years later and served in this position until 1905. Having an uncle like Song Milong in the factory, Rendao entered the Xiangsheng Shipyard as an apprentice at age eighteen and became a second-generation coppersmith. 81 Stories such as this were by no means uncommon. In 1 9 6 0 - 6 2 , when veteran workers in the machine industry were interviewed by a group of historians, the interviewees recalled that their experiences were similar to those of the Qian and the Song families. 82 The same pattern of securing labor from nearby villages obtained in the textile industry, the largest industry in modern Shanghai. 83 A 1 9 2 0 investigation into the life of textile workers in Shanghai found that all had been farmers from nearby areas. 84 The experiences of these workers reveal in a number of ways the process by which peasants sought an urban life in this still-fledgling stage of China's industrialization. Even after moving to Shanghai, many of this group continued to maintain land and houses in home villages where their families had lived for generations; some even still lived in the village while working in a factory. 85 The 1 9 2 0 survey found that workers known as kemin (guest people)— who hailed from the three counties of Nantong, Chongming, and Haimen, all near the mouth of the Yangzi River—did not become factory workers immediately upon arrival in Shanghai. Instead, they worked as tenants or farm hands in villages near Shanghai; in other words, they replaced the la-

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bor of local peasants who had gone to work in the city's factories. Land in Shanghai was much more fertile than the saline-alkali soil in their native places, so to farm land near Shanghai was already a move upward for these peasants. Their ultimate goal, however, was not to farm but to work in a factory. After settling in villages near the city, many of them managed to get acquainted with people in cotton mills and eventually found jobs there (Fig. 2).86 This pattern of urban-rural transformation continued into the 1930s. As the sociologist H. D. Lamson reported in 1 9 3 1 , villages near Yangshupu, just northeast of Shanghai, served as stepping stones into the city for those from more distant regions. "Families move into our villages from such places as Tsung Ming [Chongming] Island," Lamson wrote, "remain some time, and perhaps eventually some or all of them move into the city itself." 8 7 Compared to peasants from outside the region, local farmers were sometimes less enthusiastic about new industries invading their homeland and upsetting their peaceful rural life. When Nie Zhongfu established the Hengfeng Cotton Mill and Sheng Xuanhuai established the Sanxin Cotton Mill—both were among Shanghai's earliest modern textile mills—nearby farmers saw the plants as strange creatures and called cotton looms "the deity's vehicles"; few wanted to work in the factories. 88 When the Jiangnan Shipyard, one of China's earliest and largest modern enterprises (in 1894 it alone employed about 4 percent of all of China's industrial workers), opened in Gaochangmiao in suburban Shanghai in 1865, rumors spread among local peasants that the factory recruited workers to be "thrown into the chimney" and that workers would be "smashed by the machines." For a while the situation was so unfavorable that the shipyard had to recruit apprentices from the local orphanage. The peasants also had another reason to resent the factory. Veteran worker Qian Haigen recalled that his grandfather was a farmer of Gaochangmiao whose land was taken over by the Jiangnan Shipyard to build the factory. Qian refused to work for the new factory and instead made a living by selling green onions. He even established a family rule that none of his offspring or their descendants should work for the shipyard. However, facing the much stronger trend of industrialization, neither the rumors nor the old farmer's resentment could count for much. Barely two decades later, the Jiangnan Shipyard had become a highly desirable place to work. The Qian family, after the grandfather died, ignored his behest and entered the shipyard. 89 The job opportunities in the city included much more than just employment in the mills. In a suburban village of Pengpu, women commonly worked in textile mills and men earned a living as peddlers in the city. 90

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Fig. 2. The artist and writer Feng Zikai ( 1 8 9 8 - 1 9 7 5 ) , a native of Zhejiang but a lifetime resident of Shanghai, was known for his unique style of plain ink drawings on subjects of everyday life, an approach similar to that of Norman Rockwell. This drawing dates to about 1 9 3 2 : a farmer and a boy watch a passing train. The caption reads, "[This train] is heading for Shanghai." In an implicit but sprightly way, the cartoon expresses rural people's general longing for Shanghai. From Feng Zikai, Feng Zikai wenji.

Peasant women from Fengxian county, which was close to the southern boundary of the city, made matchboxes for Shanghai's factories. Also making matchboxes were peasants in other nearby villages, as well as in Pudong (east of the Huangpu River). 91 The 1922 gazetteer of Fahua, a tiny town southwest of Shanghai, reported that, in addition to its farmers becoming mill workers, the men also worked in Shanghai as gardeners, road construction workers, cart drivers, and unskilled workers of all sorts, while the women earned a living by making lace trimmings, hair nets, paper yuanbao (joss money to be burned for the dead). They also worked as do-

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mestic servants, a popular occupation among peasant women (Fig. 3). 92 A s early as the Guangxu period ( 1 8 7 5 - 1 9 0 8 ) , women from Shanghai's neighboring counties, such as Qingpu, were described as "going after the job [of domestic servant] like a flock of ducks." Some even abandoned their families to live in the city. 93 The popularity of domestic service never faded. The number of servants in the city increased in parallel with the general population: Shanghai in 1 9 3 0 had about 50,000 servants; by 1 9 5 0 the size of this army had almost doubled. 94 A DUAL

IDENTITY

A popular saying in Shanghai had it that "having explored up to the edge of the world, one could not find a better place than the two sides of the Huangpu River." 9 5 Other local sayings expressed the same sentiment, declaring, for instance, "what a great fortune for a person to live in this colorful and dazzling world [of Shanghai]" (ren zhule huahua shijie,

dayou

fuqi la) and "Shanghai is a mountain of gold and silver" (Shanghai

jinyin-

shan).96 For most people the very word "Shanghai" provoked excitement, stimulated the imagination, and raised hopes. " S o this is Shanghai!" was a usual exclamation of newcomers, both foreigners and the Chinese. 97 After being absent from the city for eight years and having lived in many places in the hinterland during the Sino-Japanese War, Wang Xiaolai ( 1 8 8 6 1967), one of Shanghai's leading entrepreneurs (he originally came from a village in Zhejiang), returned to Shanghai on September 8 , 1 9 4 5 . He wrote of his feelings as the airplane was about to land: "I see about 40 percent of the red-tiled houses in Huxi [west Shanghai] are newly built. Nanshi and Zhabei [the Chinese districts] have declined and show little vigor, but the former foreign concessions look like before. The happy lot of Shanghainese is indeed great. To compare Shanghai with the hinterland is to compare paradise and hell." 9 8 Almost as a rule, a new immigrant to the city would soon be proud of being not just a city person but a "Shanghai person," or Shanghairen. Along with the rise of Shanghai as China's number one city, Shanghairen were popularly associated with sophistication, astuteness, and a certain degree of Westernization. The writer Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) wrote in 1943, "The Shanghainese are not only traditional Chinese but are tempered by the high pressure of modern l i f e . . . . Everybody says that Shanghainese are bad, but they are bad with a sense of propriety. Shanghainese are good at flattering, good at currying favor with the powerful, and good at fishing in troubled waters. However, because they know the art of conducting oneself in society, they play along without overdoing it." 9 9

Fig. 3. In an alleyway, a newly arrived country woman carries her children and belongings in two rattan baskets. Immigrants like this often ended up living in a squatters' area but made a living in the city's better-off alleyway-house neighborhoods, working as domestic servants, street hawkers, tinkers, itinerant artisans, or the like. From R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

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While the people of Shanghai were proud to call themselves Shanghairen, they were not always ready to totally identify themselves with the city. Since the people of Shanghai were mostly immigrants, ties to one's native place were acknowledged as a social norm. The statement "I want to be buried in my hometown" was, for example, commonly included in wills, and virtually all children, not necessarily only those who were filial, carried out this wish. One of the major functions or services of the city's numerous "native-place associations" (tongxianghui) was to send the dead to their hometown for burial. Consequently, for many Shanghainese it was routine to go back to their home village or town to visit the family t o m b — a practice known as "sweeping the graveyard" (saomu), which usually involved a ritual ceremony for the dead and cleaning of the family graveyard. Leave for this purpose was sometimes part of employees' benefits. For instance, up to 1 9 2 4 all employees of Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company had a month's leave with full pay solely for the purpose of "sweeping the graveyard." 1 0 0 One's hometown or village was not only a place to be buried but also a place that modern Shanghainese, as well as others, regarded as a home to which one could return. This tie to one's native place was frequently utilized to solve social problems. For instance, one of the conventional methods adopted by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs to deal with unemployment was to send the unemployed back to their home villages at the government's expense (ziqian huanxiang).101

At the non-

governmental level, laid-off employees commonly received travel expenses (ichuanzi), based on the assumption that people who lost their job would return home. Sending people back to their native places was also a mechanism for dealing with wartime crises in the thirties and forties, and in fact was the principal solution adopted by government and charities for the crush of wartime refugees in late 1 9 3 7 and early 1938. 1 0 2 The Communists not only inherited this mechanism but used the power of the state to make it more effective. Mobilizing the people of Shanghai to go back to their hometowns or villages (dongyuan huixiang)

was frequently integrated

into the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. 1 0 3 While the authorities used native-place ties for their own purposes, the poor looked upon strong ties with their hometown or village as a necessity. Rickshaw pullers, port coolies, unskilled casual laborers of all sorts, the unemployed, and vagabonds tended to return to their home villages if life in the city became too difficult or their city job could provide only part of their livelihood. Some of the urban poor still had land or were tenant farmers in their home village. 104 The sociologist Lamson observed during his in-

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Table 1. The Overlap of Native Place and Trade in Republican Shanghai Native Place (xiangbang)

Trade (yebang)

Shandong

silk cocoons

Huining

tea, timber, ink sticks, pawnshops

Jiangxi

Chinese medicine, chinaware, paper, cotton cloth, Sichuan Chinese medicine, wax

Wuxi

silk, pork, preserved pork

Jinhua

ham

Qianjiang

silks and satins

Shaoxing

wine, coal and briquettes, dyeing, traditional banking (qianzhuang)

Ningbo

cotton cloth, groceries, coal and briquettes, fish, Chinese medicine

Fujian

timber, lacquer, tobacco

Guangdong

silk cloth, groceries, sugar, Cantonese food

Suzhou

fans, tea and snack bars

Wenzhou

mats, umbrellas

SOURCE:

Shen Bojing and Chen Huaipu, Shanghaishi zhinan, 347.

vestigation of working-class families in the Y a n g s h u p u area in 1 9 2 9 - 3 1 , " S o m e t i m e s people are unsuccessful in business v e n t u r e s or b e c o m e u n e m p l o y e d and m o v e back to the rural r e g i o n s . " 1 0 5 Better-off people and those w h o had f i r m l y settled in the city also had their reasons to v a l u e native-place ties. Businesspeople found that netw o r k i n g based on native-place origins w a s one of the m o s t convenient and reliable w a y s to conduct business in this sojourners' city. Table 1 s h o w s s o m e samples of the overlap b e t w e e n native place ( x i a n g b a n g ) and trade (;yebang)

in the city. T h e p h e n o m e n o n of certain trades being dominated

b y people of certain native origins had its roots in the pre-treaty-port era. Traditional trade organizations such as guilds w e r e f o r m e d either according to the m e r c h a n t s ' native place and n a m e d a f t e r it (such as the G u a n g Z h a o g o n g s u o , or the C a n t o n guild), or according to the product or service provided and n a m e d after that (such as the douye

gongsuo,

or the bean guild).

T h i r t y native-place trade organizations could be f o u n d in S h a n g h a i prior to 1842. T h e s e institutions did not fall into desuetude after the c o m i n g of the W e s t , b u t instead flourished along w i t h the rise of m o d e r n Shanghai. B y 1 9 1 1 , at least 108 such organizations w e r e operating in the city. 1 0 6 T h e

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overlap of trade and native place was such common knowledge in the city that an average resident might be able to give a list of the overlap in a casual conversation, reporting, for example, that the Cantonese were known for trading in tobacco, opium, and foreign groceries, Anhui merchants in tea and silk, merchants from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanxi in banking and finance, and so on. A t a time when industries were developing in the city, local origins divided not only business owners but their employees as well. Examples of such divisions were everywhere (although they were not necessarily rigid): silk weaving, printing, and dyeing were mostly done by people from Shenxian, Dongyang, Xinchang, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Huzhou (all countries in Zhejiang province), and Changzhou; flour milling and oil pressing were done by people from Wuxi, Haimen, Ningbo, Shaoxing, and Hubei; shipping was the business of people from Guangdong, Tianjin, and Ningbo; and the ranks of the police force were filled with natives of Hebei and Shandong. 1 0 7 In industries, business owners tended to recruit employees from their native places. M u Ouchu, an America-educated entrepreneur whose investment in textiles represented an early Chinese effort to promote modern industry, began to recruit workers from his native province of Hunan for his Shanghai cotton mills in 1 9 1 9 . 1 0 8 A recruiting poster read: "Since Hunan has frequently suffered from war, the life of people there, especially of women, is difficult. So, a portion of the hiring quota in m y factory in Shanghai is reserved for Hunan women in order to promote the idea that women can earn a livelihood by themselves, to train skilled textile workers, and to prepare for the growth of the textile industry in Hunan in the future." 1 0 9 Recruitment policies such as this became almost a standard. Liu Hongsheng, one of the best-known entrepreneurs of twentieth-century China, had his enterprises recruit workers from his home county of Dinghai in Zhejiang for more than a decade, beginning in 1936. Liu himself decided on this policy. 110 A less well known capitalist, Wang Daban, who started as a shop assistant in Ningbo and later came to own five factories in Shanghai and Ningbo, also favored hiring people from his native Ningbo. When Wang established a new printing and dyeing factory in Shanghai in 1 9 3 5 , the first bunch of workers were all from his hometown; the Ningbo bang (Ningbo group) formed the backbone of Wang's enterprises. 1 1 1 Native-place ties were perhaps even more central in the Fufeng Flour Mill, the first Chinese-owned modern mechanized flour mill. Its owners, the Sun family of Anhui, came to Shanghai to establish a mill in 1898. B y 1 9 3 7 , the factory they had established was known in the trade as "number

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one in the Far East." But the management of this enterprise was rather provincial. For half a century, chief executives and management personnel were, with only one exception, all members of the Sun clan from Anhui. About 90 percent of the employees were of Anhui origin, and many had been directly recruited from Sun's hometown, Shouzhou, and its vicinity. These employees were not only "peasants of yesterday"; they were to some extent still regarded as peasants by the Suns: while they worked in the Suns' mill, many of them kept their families back in their native village as tenant farmers of the Sun family. 1 1 2 Native-place ties between employers and employees provided a natural linkage between the two and made for easier management: the owners felt comfortable and safe having tongxiang

(fellow villagers or townsmen)

wield the hammers in the workshops while the employees were grateful to their boss for giving them a job. But native-place ties in business and work were not simply a matter of practicality; they were also a matter of emotion. They reflected the dual identity of the people of Shanghai, who, while they happily saw themselves as Shanghainese, also liked to maintain every possible tie with their native place. This is not unlike an ethnic group in the United States that tries to preserve some degree of its culture. A s most of the people of Shanghai were immigrants, only about 1 0 percent of the entries in a typical Who's Who of Shanghai

would be identified as natives of

the city. Although all people in such publications were supposed to be Shanghairen—since they were listed as "Shanghai celebrities" and the publications customarily bore titles such as The Celebrities Enterprises

and Commerce

Biographies

of Shanghai's

of

(Shanghai gongshang mingren lu), Celebrities

Shanghai's Pictorial

(Shanghai mingren xiangzhuan),

and so o n — a native place was always put before the person's name. Thus, one reads of "Yuhang (native place) Zhang Taiyan," " W u x i n g (native place) Chen Qimei," "Foshan (native place) W u Yanren," and so on. 1 1 3 These people were Shanghainese because they lived in the city, had careers there, and perhaps would stay in the city all their lives. But at the same time they identified themselves by their native origins, just as contemporary Americans are sometimes distinguished as "Irish American," "Jewish American," "Chinese American," and so on. Among all the factors that immigrants identify with or assimilate from a new culture, language is perhaps the most essential and profound. The historian Xiong Yuezhi points out that the first criterion for distinguishing a "Shanghai person" was the fact that the person spoke the Shanghai dialect. Without speaking the standard Shanghai dialect (that is, the dialect as spoken in the city proper), he asserts, one could hardly be recognized by

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one's peers as Shanghainese. 1 1 4 This statement is more applicable to contemporary Shanghai, where the strictly imposed urban household registration system has produced at least two generations of Shanghai-born people who speak the pure Shanghai dialect, while reducing immigration to an insignificant level, than to pre-1949 Shanghai, when immigrants poured into the city, bringing with them all sorts of local tongues. Moreover, the Shanghai dialect itself has undergone some changes directly caused by the impact of dialects spoken by the immigrants. The Shanghai dialect was originally a branch of the Songjiang dialect. A t late as the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was still the language commonly spoken in the city. The phonetics of the Shanghai dialect recorded by the Sinologist Joseph Edkins ( 1 8 2 3 - 1 9 0 5 ) in the midnineteenth century, for instance, were those of the Songjiang dialect with a slight Pudong accent. In other words, in the first few decades of the treatyport era, the Shanghai dialect essentially retained its original form. 1 1 5 To this day this dialect is still spoken by people in the vicinity of Shanghai, especially in the counties of Shanghai, Fengxian, Nanhui, and Songjiang. The modern Shanghai dialect, the one spoken in twentieth-century Shanghai proper, diverged from its source by absorbing influences from the Suzhou and Ningbo dialects. Obviously, this was because immigrants from these areas were numerous in the late nineteenth century. The Shanghai dialect is perhaps the youngest in China: it was gradually formed at the turn of the century, and in the early Republican period it became distinguishable as the dialect of Shanghai proper. In 1 9 1 6 , when the philologist Gilbert Mcintosh published his book on the Shanghai dialect, he had to include many new expressions and idioms, which suggests that the dialect was absorbing new blood. 1 1 6 In the Republican period, the original Shanghai dialect, the one with a Songjiang or Pudong accent, gradually came to be regarded as the language of the country folk (xiangxiaren), and the new dialect prevailed as what might be called urban speech. Indeed, the Shanghai dialect had a very limited "speech zone," literally only the city proper. It was the dialect spoken in the foreign concessions and their immediate vicinity, that is, an area of about 60 square miles. To the east, across the Huangpu River, the accent was slightly different, but different enough so that a Shanghainese from the west side of the river felt he was in the country. 1 1 7 It is ironic that the Pudong, or Songjiang, accent, the original Shanghai dialect, came to be regarded as countrified speech, while in this city of immigrants, accents of all sorts were generally seen as normal. People who spoke the Shanghai dialect with an accent were sometimes nicknamed, ac-

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cording to their native origin and age, as "Little Shaoxing," "Old Guangdong/' "Little Suzhou," "Old Ningbo," and so on, but this was customarily regarded as a cordial form of address, and there was little or no sense of discrimination or prejudice involved. 118 Like many immigrants in the United States who speak a foreign tongue at home, it was common for people in Shanghai to speak the dialect of their native place as well as the Shanghai dialect. 119 Dragons and Fishes Jumbled

Together

By the 1930s, Shanghai was a city of 3 million strangers, each of whom, it may be presumed, had his or her own reasons for living in this metropolis. For the privileged—the wealthy, the politically powerful, the intellectually outstanding—the city was a foundation for their elite status. For the poor, the city was a fragile life buoy. And for those in between, the city was the substance out of which the dream for a better life might be spun. While every city is a mixture of types and classes, and Shanghai may have had its share of the universal social stratifications, it also was unique. So far I have reckoned the diversity of the people of Shanghai horizontally, by observing the various races and nationalities of the foreigners who lived in the city as well as the variety of native-place origins among the Chinese residents. Now let us turn to a vertical reckoning in order to uncover the social and economic strata of modern Shanghai. THE

ELITES

Shanghai's commercial prosperity and security (assured by the foreign powers) made the city a real paradise for wealthy Chinese. From the early twentieth century on, bureaucrats, warlords, politicians, landowners, literati, and magnates of all sorts came to the city seeking a life of comfort and luxury. During and after the Taiping Rebellion, many of those who fled to Shanghai were wealthy landlords, merchants, and literati from Jiangnan. These well-to-do immigrants were generally of two types. One took advantage of the favorable commercial environment of the city by investing in various types of businesses and, generally, got richer. It was from this type that the compradors and China's modern entrepreneurs sprang, as discussed below. The other type consisted of those who lived in Shanghai chiefly for the comforts and freedom that it afforded. In time, retreating to Shanghai became popular among the rich and the celebrities of China. The epithet "Mr. Hermit" (yugong) was applied to those whose goal seemed to

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be a comfortable exile in the city, free of responsibilities and concerns. Needless to say, not every Mr. Hermit was a real recluse, and it was not unusual for politicians to retreat to Shanghai as a strategy for restoring their prestige or staging a comeback. 120 In any case, these celebrities left a legacy to the city in the form of the grand houses and gardens they built. The late Qing reformist Kang Youwei ( 1 8 5 8 - 1 9 2 7 ) , for instance, spent his later years in Shanghai. From 1 9 1 4 until his death, Kang had three spacious homes in Shanghai. The site of one of his residences in the International Settlement was big enough, after he had moved out, to build first a Buddhist temple and, later, a pharmaceutical factory (which is still there today). Another of Kang's residences was demolished in 1 9 3 0 and replaced by a residential compound of twenty-nine three-story alleyway-houses (with a garage on the first floor) that, in 1988, housed 222 households, or 828 residents. 121 The bureaucratic bigwig Sheng Xuanhuai ( 1 8 4 4 - 1 9 1 6 ) also lived in Shanghai after the 1 9 1 1 revolution: his luxurious Western-style residence is now the consulate general of Japan. 122 Even many busy politicians who never had time to be a "Mr. Hermit" maintained villas in Shanghai. Li Hongzhang ( 1 8 2 3 - 1 9 0 1 ) , for instance, had a villa for his concubine, Dingxiang. The villa is preserved to this day as a resort known for its combination of charming traditional Chinese garden and chic European architecture. 123 High-ranking politicians of the Nationalist regime almost without exception kept a residence in Shanghai. The quiet tree-lined avenues on the west side of the city were dotted with the residences of many major political figures in the Nanjing government. 1 2 4 Shanghai proved to be a better place to settle complicated and subtle political issues than the capital city of Nanjing. It was said that after 1 9 2 7 the capital was the stage where political drama was performed, while Shanghai was the backstage. 125 The relationship between Nanjing and Shanghai was rather like that, in contemporary China, between Beijing and the summer resort of Beidaihe, which has been the favorite site for secret gatherings (and sometimes formal meetings) of top Communist leaders. Not only was Shanghai the place where big political deals were arranged; it was also where big business deals were made. And, at least in the nineteenth century, big business deals were rarely cut without the intervention of middlemen known as compradors. These men served as agents for foreign firms. They were generally quick-witted, spoke a foreign tongue—most often pidgin English—and had some knowledge of foreign customs and business norms. Without them, foreign companies would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to do business in China. In the middle of the nineteenth century, few Chinese spoke a Western language,

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and few Westerners spoke Chinese. Furthermore, Western businesspeople had at best an imperfect knowledge of the Chinese market and Chinese ways of doing business. Finally, many Chinese merchants simply would not deal directly with foreigners. Compradors were thus crucial to conducting business, and consequently they were well compensated: their high salaries and commissions (which were usually much higher than the salary) soon made them China's foremost nouveau riche in the second half of the nineteenth century. 126 Compradors in Shanghai were almost exclusively immigrants from Guangdong and a few Jiangnan cities such as Ningbo and Suzhou. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Russell and Company (American, founded 1846) employed ten compradors in Shanghai, Jardine Matheson and Company (British, founded 1843) employed fifteen, and Dent, Beale and Company (British, founded in 1843), six: none of these compradors was a native of Shanghai. 1 2 7 Compradors of foreign banks were mostly Ningbo and Suzhou natives. These men were usually from well-to-do families that had moved to Shanghai late in the nineteenth century. They learned English in their youth and entered a foreign firm, sometimes first as a clerk and then, later, as a comprador. Compradors of foreign banks often had experience in a traditional Chinese bank (qianzhuang) before entering a foreign bank. The position of comprador was often passed down from generation to generation, and thus by the turn of this century socalled comprador clans (maiban shijia) had emerged. 128 Most compradors simultaneously had their own businesses in addition to working for a foreign firm. Thus after the 1920s, when the role of the comprador declined, these people managed to remain the richest class in Chinese society. The Communists labeled them the "comprador-capitalist" class and made them a chief target of the revolution. Indeed, many successful capitalists in the city, especially the biggest industrialists, had been compradors. This is reflected in the membership of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai zongshanghui),

which was founded in

1 9 0 2 and became the city's most influential business organization in the early twentieth century. 129 In 1 9 2 5 - 2 6 , 45 percent of the chamber's board of directors and 22 percent of its members had a dual identity: as both comprador and business owner. 1 3 0 No matter what kind of trade or business the entrepreneurs of Shanghai followed, the majority of them were not local people but immigrants. In 1 9 2 3 , 86 percent of the members of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce were from Zhejiang. Of the thirty-five members who served on its board of directors in 1924, only four were natives of Shanghai. 1 3 1 Of

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69 Chinese banks, or qianzhuang, in 1 9 2 1 , only 7 were run by Shanghai natives; by 1 9 3 3 , out of 72 qianzhuang in Shanghai, only 3 were run by natives. 132 In 1944, of the 1 7 7 real estate companies in the city, only 35 (one-fifth) were run by natives. 1 3 3 Shanghai was the capital of modern Chinese industry, and in the early twentieth century the capitalists of Shanghai were, as Parks Coble has pointed out, "the most powerful native economic group in China." 1 3 4 Prior to 1927, more than one-fifth of the nation's industrial enterprises (exclusive of mines) were located in Shanghai; more than a quarter of the country's industrial capital was concentrated there. In 1 9 3 2 - 3 3 , half of China's 2,435 modern factories (defined as mechanized and employing at least 30 workers) were in Shanghai. 1 3 5 Thus any serious study of the Chinese bourgeoisie must begin with Shanghai. As Bergère has indicated, this is not just because the Shanghai bourgeoisie "are the easiest to find out about; it is also because, of all the [Chinese] entrepreneurs, they were both the most active and the most numerous. Furthermore, most of the entrepreneurs, in their ordinary activities, always appear to function as a group at an essentially local or regional level. To disregard their geographical anchorage would [lead] to the empty categorizations characteristic of a familiar kind of Marxist analysis." 1 3 6 One may add that the Shanghai bourgeoisie was not really "Shanghai," or local. The diverse native-place origins of Shanghai's capitalists and the reach of their activities beyond the boundaries of the city (the former often contributed to the latter) greatly increased the significance of this class at the national level. Turning our scan from businesspeople to educated modern professionals, we find another elite, which included doctors of Western medicine, executive managers, accountants, attorneys, engineers, and other higher professionals who were either employed in the modern sector (industry, banking, transportation, and communications) or were self-employed. A l though these people constituted less than 1 percent of the population of Shanghai, Shanghai had more of them than any other Chinese city. 137 M a n y professionals were also investors of sorts; thus they were not merely white-collar workers but capitalists as well. All had received a higher education, often in mission schools and universities; some were so-called returned students, who had been educated overseas. Professionals appeared in public in Western attire, socialized with foreigners, and (some at least) spoke fluent English. They lived in quiet and comfortable areas in west Shanghai, typically in what were called garden alleyway-houses (huayuan lilong) or in detached houses (yangfang). The western part of Bubbling

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Well Road (today's Nanjingxi Road), Zhaofeng Road (today's Yuyuan Road), and the so-called extra-Settlement roads (yuejie zhulu, lit., "roads that exceed the boundaries")—areas that were immediately west of the foreign concessions—-were known for their concentration of elegant homes. 1 3 8 M a n y of the residents had private cars (or rickshaws), kept servants, and were avid club-goers. In the eyes of their fellow countrymen, the west-end residents were a different kind of Chinese: a "superior Chinese" (gaodeng

Huaren).

Another elite included writers, actors, painters, musicians, movie stars, and so on—what might be called the cultural elite. This group gave birth to and nurtured the so-called Haipai (Shanghai school) culture, which became locked in battle with the Jingpai (Beijing school) tradition. The division between the two started in the late nineteenth century over differences in painting styles, but later spread to other cultural dimensions such as theater and literature. Eventually, the contest (at least in the eyes of the Haipai) became one between a vibrant, liberal culture centered in Shanghai and a conservative, traditional culture symbolized by Beijing. In the Tongzhi period ( 1 8 6 2 - 1 8 7 4 ) , among the immigrants to Shanghai from the Jiangnan region were professional and amateur painters, many of whom were traditional "men of letters" (wenren). Instead of following the regular, orthodox track of pursuing a career in the imperial government, these people chose to live in the foreign concessions and make a living by selling their artistic works. Inasmuch as polite society had always considered the purpose of painting to be self-cultivation, the commercedriven paintings done in Shanghai were regarded as vulgar. 1 3 9 Later, this same tendency toward commercialism was also found in theaters. "Peking opera" as played in Shanghai was known as the southern style or simply the Shanghai style; it had a reputation of emphasizing—for the purpose of attracting a large audience—lavish and sensational effects (such as costume and stage sets) over skillful performance. 140 B y the Republican period, the word "Haipai" also came to be associated with literature. The so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction can be regarded as the first "Shanghai-style" literature. This writing took entertainment to be the purpose of fiction; plots were dominated by sensational and often tragic love stories, although a sober-minded reader might still find social and moral value in these stories. 1 4 1 In the early Republican period, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school dominated the literary world of Shanghai: about half the literary magazines published in China in the second decade of the twentieth century were published in Shanghai,

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and most of them were works of this school. In the three decades between 1908 and 1 9 3 8 , 1 8 0 newspapers and magazines of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies type were published in Shanghai; the year 1 9 1 4 alone saw 2 1 new newspapers and magazines of this type founded in Shanghai. 1 4 2 But this was just one type of publication. Modern Shanghai was China's publishing center. From the late nineteenth century to 1956, when private ownership was transferred to state or collective ownership, about six hundred presses (not including newspaper and magazine publishers) opened in the city, most of them during the Republican period. The concentration of bookstores in Fuzhou Road and Henan Road in the International Settlement made these "cultural streets" famous nationwide. 143 No city in Republican China enjoyed more freedom of the press and cultural prosperity than Shanghai. The city therefore attracted, or produced, China's most predominant intellectuals. Hu Shi, the hero of the New Cultural Movement, recalled that it was his early education (from 1904 to 1 9 1 0 ) in Shanghai that made him an enthusiastic follower of Charles Darwin ( 1 8 0 9 - 8 2 ) and Thomas Huxley ( 1 8 2 5 - 9 5 )

ar,

d

a

pioneer advocate of the vernacular language. 144 A

galaxy of twentieth-century China's outstanding writers, such as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Yu Dafu, Xia Yan, and revolutionary intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai, all lived in Shanghai for a substantial period of time and published there. None of them was a native of Shanghai. All sojourned in the city; its dazzling life inspired and stimulated them to create works fated to become classics of an era. Financially, these intellectuals occupied the lower rungs of the elite group. In wealth, they simply could not be compared with the city's capitalist bigwigs. But their incomes allowed them to live comfortable lives. A productive writer of popular fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century, for instance, could earn as much as $300 per month. The writer Bao Tianxiao got $ 1 2 0 a month in 1907 by writing three hours in the morning for a fiction magazine and spending afternoon and evening hours writing for a newspaper. 145 Working as an editor of the Commercial Press, Mao Dun earned a monthly salary of $ 1 0 0 in 1 9 2 1 ; Yu Dafu's wife recalls that in the late 1920s, every month she collected $ 1 0 0 - 2 0 0 in royalties for her husband. 146 B y comparison, a skilled worker's monthly salary in 1926 was $ 3 0 - 4 0 ; that was sufficient to support a family of five. 1 4 7 Still, given Shanghai's congested living conditions, the income of a writer typically allowed him or her to rent a house in an average alleyway-house neighborhood, next door to, say, a skilled worker or a shop clerk. But the differences were still there. M a n y a writer (including such luminaries as Lu Xun, Mao

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Dun, and Yu Dafu) was able to rent a whole alleyway-house, while his neighbors shared a house with other tenants. These well-off and popular writers were the top of the heap that included many young intellectuals who had come to Shanghai to make a living as freelance writers. Economically, these junior writers may or may not have been part of the elite. In any case, their income from selling their works was not necessarily greater than that of an average mechanic or shopkeeper. Many struggling writers rented a little "pavilion room" (tingzijian)

in the city's common alleyway-house neighborhoods (dis-

cussed in detail in chapter 4) and lived among the populace while maintaining the mentality of an elite. Indeed, these intellectuals in Republican Shanghai bore some similarities to the French writers and poets who worked during the time of the rise of French industry after the Napoleonic Wars, as well as to American writers of the 1920s who escaped to Europe in search of a better environment for self-expression. Cowley's description of American writers in Paris in the twenties could also apply to intellectuals who sojourned in Shanghai in roughly the same period (the 1920s and the 1930s): "Some of them became revolutionists; others took refuge in pure art; but most of them demanded a real world of present satisfactions, in which they could cherish aristocratic ideals while living among carpenters and grisettes." 1 4 8 THE PETTY

URBANITES

"Petty urbanite," or xiaoshimin

(translated in this book as "little urban-

ite"), was a blanket term popularly known and liberally used to refer, often with condescension, to city or town people who were of the middle or lower-middle social ranks. Like most conventional labels for a social class or group, xiaoshimin was never precisely defined. It was less clear who should be included in the category than who should be excluded. The elite at the top and the urban poor at the bottom would never be referred to as xiaoshimin. It was the people who stood in between who were called "petty urbanites." The liberal use of the term contributed to its vagueness. Although people who used the word—which was almost everyone—certainly knew what it meant, nowhere in Chinese sources is the term adequately analyzed and carefully defined. In the West, Chinese petty urbanites have been discussed mostly in connection with the readership of twentieth-century Chinese fiction and periodicals. Perry Link, who is the first scholar in the West to have taken up the issue of xiaoshimin in academic research, applies an annotation from a Chinese dictionary to explain that xiaoshimin refers

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to "the middle class or the petty bourgeoisie." Links points out that "the term is taken to include small merchants, various kinds of clerks and secretaries, high school students, housewives, and other modestly educated, marginally well off urbanites." These people were the major audience of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies novels of the second and third decades of the twentieth century. 149 According to Frederic Wakeman and Wen-shin Yeh, in the Republican era the petty urbanites "constituted a huge new urban audience for periodicals like Shenghuo

(Life)." These people were "lit-

erate clerks and apprentices in trade, manufacturing, the professions, the public and private service sectors, as well as among elementary and normal school teachers." 1 5 0 While the term "middle class" often does not convey the precise character of a social group and sometimes is even misleading (because of, among other things, our contemporary stereotypical notion of this category), the xiaoshimin of Shanghai in some ways resembled the Kleinburger of early modern Germany. Like the xiaoshimin, the Kleinburger were "socially and economically as distinct from capitalist bourgeoisie as they were from the propertyless proletariat." They were predominantly craftspeople but also shopkeepers, petty traders, and minor officeholders, men with a "narrow, particularistic outlook on life." These words precisely describe the mentality of the Chinese xiaoshimin (as we shall see in later chapters). The historian Christopher Friedrichs has selected "lower middle class" as the best available translation of "Kleinburger." 1 5 1 It seems to me that the approaches to defining xiaoshimin have paid attention only to occupational or vocational criteria; none has focused on what made these people a community. In fact, the expression itself has a connotation associated with community. From a purely terminological point of view, the word "xiaoshimin" consists of two parts: xiao (little) and shimin

(urbanite). Here, "urbanite" stresses one's residential orientation

(i.e., city people, not country people), and "little" stresses one's social standing (i.e., a small potato, not a big shot). Combining these two parts of the expression, the term xiaoshimin has strong implications for one's community background. When people used the term "xiaoshimin" to describe an individual, it was often with the idea of "a person from a common neighborhood." In premodern times, there was a similar term to describe townspeople, that is, shijing

zhibei

(a fellow from the marketplace). Thus the

image of "petty urbanite" carries implications for social rank based on community, and it is the residential community that is being emphasized. When people used the term, the first thing that came to mind was usually

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a type of person whose outlook was limited by the community in which he or she lived. 152 In modern Shanghai, the xiaoshimin were identified with a type of residence known as the shikumen

house. Emerging in the late nineteenth cen-

tury, shikumen houses were first a type of dwelling for well-to-do families. Later, the structure of the shikumen underwent a number of simplifications, mainly a downsizing of the house and a reduction of its cost. B y the early twentieth century this type of house had become the single most common form of residence in the city, and those who lived in these houses were mostly middle- and lower-middle-income people. In other words, the shikumen were the homes of Shanghai's petty urbanites. The expression "the petty urbanites of the shikumen neighborhood" was common in the city. 153 One of the major constituents of Shanghai's petty urbanites, as well as one of the primary residents of the shikumen neighborhoods, was so-called zhiyuan, a broad social category chiefly composed of office workers, clerks, all types of white-collar workers, and shop assistants. According to one definition, zhiyuan were "service personnel who work in economic, cultural, and political offices or institutions." 1 5 4 Table 2 lists various types of zhiyuan in Shanghai in the 1930s. B y the late 1930s, there were about 250,000 to 300,000 people in this category in the city. 155 Zhiyuan and their family members numbered no fewer than 1 . 5 million persons, or about 40 percent of the city's population in the middle thirties (when Shanghai had 3.5 million people). 156 Another major group of petty urbanites was factory workers. In discussing industrial workers in modern China, scholars both inside and outside China have often resorted to broad generalizations and even stereotyping. Inside China, this was largely because official ideology needed to forge an image, however distorted, of a unified proletariat as the leading class of the revolution. Outside China, scholars simply lacked information that would have made possible a nuanced picture. This latter weakness has been significantly remedied by recent research on Chinese labor, which sees industrial workers as a highly stratified social group divided by local origins, type of work, and gender. 157 But it is also important to examine the residential patterns of factory workers. Where workers lived and what type of house they lived in was not only a measure of their economic status but also, like the role played by the workplace, a vital influence on their outlook. Surveys conducted in the early 1930s found that Shanghai's factory workers lived in three major types of houses: alleyway or shikumen

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Table 2. Zhiyuan (White-Collar Employees) in Republican Shanghai

Year

Trade or Institution

Number of Zhiyuan

1934

Stores (old type)

1936

Six major department stores

82,900 3,000

1936

Hardware stores and Western-type pharmacies

9,200

1936

Banking and finance

1936

Schools and colleges

1933

Media

1934

Postal service and transportation

10,000 45,000

10,000 13,500 15,000-17,000

1937

Foreign firms

1936

Municipal Council of the French Concession

1,400

1936

Municipal government

2,100

1938

Factory office and other office workers

SOURCE: Zhang Zhongli, ed., Jindai Shanghai Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 7 0 1 - 2 .

chengshi

80,000-100,000 yanjiu,

724; Zhu Bangxing et al.,

houses, old-style one-story houses (pingfang), and straw shacks. Of 76,218 houses inhabited by workers, 37 percent were alleyway houses, that is, the typical type of house in Shanghai's petty urbanite neighborhoods. These houses were found virtually everywhere in the city; they were the homes of about half of Shanghai's factory workers and their families. 158 The surveys found that the distinction between so-called workers' zones and nonworkers' zones was by no means rigid; families of industrial workers were frequently found in areas quite distant from factories, intermixed with white-collar households. 159 In other words, a considerable part of Shanghai's industrial workers lived side by side with people of many other social types. Factory workers in these neighborhoods were mostly skilled or semiskilled men (and some women) who had a relatively stable or long-term (in contradistinction to casual) job in an industrial enterprise. These workers and their families who lived in shikumen houses were quite distinct from their "class brothers" who lived at the bottom of society: casual workers, day laborers, and unskilled coolies of all sorts. The latter group was driven by poverty to the squatters' areas on the outskirts of the city proper and were despised by the contented petty urbanites in shikum e n — l e t alone the aloof elites in the city's wealthy neighborhoods—as rustic coolies or simply country bumpkins. 160

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THE U R B A N POOR

It is understandable that most people in Shanghai tended to see shack dwellers as hayseeds. The urban poor were overwhelmingly former peasants. They may have migrated to the city but they were not quite urbanized, if one defines urbanization as primarily involving having a stable job and place of residence in the city. These people lacked any of the three basic conditions that allowed a newcomer to find a fairly desirable and relatively stable job: skill, money, and a good social network. First, most peasant immigrants were illiterate and unskilled. Their opportunities were further blocked by the fact that they could not afford the lump sum payment or nonrefundable "deposit" (which was virtually a payment) required by many trades in Shanghai for obtaining a starting position or an apprenticeship. The amount of the deposit varied by trade (or individual enterprise); commonly, it was equivalent to two months' salary in the trade in question. 161 The poor simply could not afford such a large payment; hence they could not take the first step toward a permanent job. Finally, poor rural immigrants usually did not have connections in the city that would have helped them find a good job. The best networking connection they might have was a relative, a fellow villager, or an acquaintance who had come to Shanghai earlier. But these earlier arrivals themselves were, more often than not, at the bottom rung of society and could hardly offer much assistance. At best, if connections ever worked, they only helped the newcomer find a place in the ranks of Shanghai's povertystricken multitudes. 162 On one hand, the growth of Shanghai's modern industries during and after World War I, and the urban development that paralleled it, resulted in countless job opportunities, as well as all the amenities and accoutrements of modern urban life; this proved to be a powerful attraction. On the other hand, in the countryside economic and social deterioration, wars, banditry, and natural disasters that frequently marked the Republican period created an army of uneasy peasants who imagined the city to be a refuge. Thus, the city and an army ready to surrender to its attractions met in early-twentieth-century Shanghai. The result was an onslaught of rural poor who stuck to the city for sheer survival. The most sizable groups of the urban poor in Republican-era Shanghai were rickshaw pullers, dockworkers, street beggars, and countless casual workers—and the unemployed. In the mid-i920S, there were about 62,000 rickshaw pullers, 22,000 wheelbarrow and handcart operators and carriage

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drivers ( m a f u , or "grooms"), and 35,500 dockworkers in Shanghai. In the late 1920s, there were about 50,000-60,000 dockworkers; in the mid1930s, 20,000-25,000 street beggars; and in the late 1930s and early 1940s, 100,000 rickshaw pullers. 163 These figures do not include the army of casual factory workers and the unemployed. B y the end of the Republican period, close to 1 million people like these lived in the city's shantytowns. Although, as noted above, not all factory workers were necessarily among the urban poor, many of them were. While some skilled and semiskilled workers obtained stable positions in factories, lived in average lowermiddle-class alleyway-house neighborhoods, and therefore ascended to the ranks of the petty urbanites, casual workers (linshigong) descended to the bottom of society. Available statistics do not give us the number of casual workers in Shanghai in any given year, since the category "factory worker" in all statistics does not distinguish casuals from long-term workers (changgong). According to official statistics, Shanghai in 1 9 2 0 had 1 8 1 , 4 8 5 factory workers; the number increased to 223,681 in 1928 and reached 394,654 by January 1950. 1 6 4 Although these statistics give us no hint of the relative proportion of long-term and temporary workers, hiring of casual workers was increasingly common in Shanghai's factories through the Republican period. It is therefore safe to say that a sizable portion of the city's factory workers were casual or day workers who were poorly paid and under constant threat of unemployment. B y the end of the Republican period, these temporary laborers, vagabonds, the unemployed and underemployed, and the like, plus their families, made up nearly one-fifth of Shanghai's 5 million people. 165 Like the disadvantaged in any society, they were despised and discriminated against by the city's general public; but they could not be ignored. The importance of these people in the life of the city lies not only in their large number but also in their backgrounds. The poor moved to the city for virtually the same reason that most of the city's better-off people did: to find a better life. Thus the overwhelmingly rural backgrounds of the urban poor reflected a profound social phenomenon in twentieth-century China: for millions of peasants, an urban life, no matter how arduous and difficult, meant a better life. The world of rickshaws, with its everyday presence in the city, provides a powerful and illuminating example of such pursuit.

CHAPTER 2

The World of Rickshaws

In July 1926, Hu Shi ( 1 8 9 1 - 1 9 6 2 ) , while visiting Harbin, the metropolis dubbed the "Shanghai of North China" by virtue of its foreign concessions and foreign (in this case, Russian) influence, was struck by the difference between the former Russian concession, where (as a legacy of foreign administration) rickshaws were not permitted, and the Chinese district, where rickshaws still operated in abundance. 1 Hu Shi declared that he had found "the boundary between Eastern and Western civilizations." That dividing line was, he later concluded, "precisely the boundary between the rickshaw and the automobile civilizations." 2 In the early twentieth century, the rickshaw was a symbol of the backwardness of Chinese cities, and the rickshaw coolie remained "the classic example of his class." 3 Shanghai would have been a totally different city had there been no rickshaws. The importance of these conveyances lay not just in their role in the city's transportation system nor in their contribution to the exotic appearance of the city. More significant, rickshaws were the means of livelihood for thousands of people. 4 The story surrounding this simple vehicle is a richly multifarious one. The rumble of the rickshaw reflected the rhythm of life in the city, not in the sense that the din of the rickshaws' wheels as they rolled over the city's asphalt streets literally contributed to the hubbub of the city but in the sense that the rickshaw trade, or "racket," was part of the city's commercial culture. The rickshaw puller was certainly exploited and oppressed, but at the same time he also saw his opportunity to survive by playing his role in the trade. Just as the "backwardness" of the rickshaw was relative, the plight of the pullers also had its context.

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Rickshaws The rickshaw, like many other things introduced to modern China via Shanghai, had a Western connection. In the spring of 1 8 7 3 , a French merchant named Menard came to Shanghai from Japan with the idea of opening a business in imitation of the lucrative rickshaw business in Japan. 5 Early in June, he petitioned the municipal council of the French Concession for a patent right to run "hand-pulled vehicles" for ten years. The request was discussed by the council, which then consulted the municipal council of the British Settlement. The councils denied Menard's request for a patent but agreed to permit the business in both concessions on the grounds that the operation of such vehicles would improve the flow of traffic and increase revenue. The councils planned to allow up to 1,000 rickshaws to operate in the two concessions (500 in each) that year. Twenty licenses, each for 25 rickshaws, were issued in the French Concession. A s a courtesy to Menard, he was granted 1 2 licenses to run 300 rickshaws. 6 The news was soon publicized. In August, Shanghai's major Chinese newspaper, Shenbao, reported the forthcoming arrival of rickshaws and indicated that the vehicles would be brought from Japan by Western merchants. 7 On March 2 4 , 1 8 7 4 , Menard registered the first rickshaw company in Shanghai. The next three-quarters of 1 8 7 4 saw another 9 rickshaw companies opened in Shanghai, all owned by Westerners. A t the end of that year, these 1 0 companies had about 1,000 rickshaws in operation. 8 The term "rickshaw," or "ricsha," was originally derived from the Japanese term jinrikisha,

meaning "man-power-vehicle," 9 which also became

the formal Chinese name of the vehicle (pronounced renliche in Chinese). But the latter name was never popularly used in Shanghai. In this city, the rickshaw was at the beginning known as dongyangche,

meaning, "East-

foreign-vehicle," or rather, in an alternative but perhaps more accurate translation, "Japanese vehicle," a name that reflected the origin of the conveyance. B y 1 9 1 3 , the S M C issued a regulation that all public rickshaws be painted yellow in order to more easily distinguish them from private rickshaws, and after that, rickshaws were commonly called huang

baoche

(lit., yellow private vehicle). This became the most popular name for the vehicle. 10 Once introduced, rickshaws steadily gained in popularity. In 1 8 8 2 , 1 , 5 0 0 rickshaws were in business in Shanghai's foreign concessions; by 1 9 1 4 , the International Settlement alone had 9,718 public rickshaws. 11 The merits of the rickshaw as a means of urban transportation were obvious. In compar-

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ison with the old single-wheel wheelbarrow, which was a major conveyance in nineteenth-century Shanghai, the rickshaw was comfortable. Technical improvements of the rickshaw through the decades after its introduction made it even more fit for travel. These included discarding the original iron-shod wooden wheels in favor of solid rubber tires, then pneumatic rubber tires, adding a backrest for the comfort of the passenger, replacing the flat, hard seat with spring cushions, adding lights, and so on. 1 2 Rickshaw fares were within the means of the common people of the city. A ride of a mile or so—the most common distance for which a rickshaw was hired—cost less than 20 cents in the late 1920s and the early 1930s (see Table 3). That was about as much as the average tip that a passenger gave a taxi driver at the time. 1 3 The most important appeal of the rickshaw, however, was its flexibility. Without awkward jostling, the rickshaw could easily gain access to literally every corner in the city's numerous winding and narrow streets and alleyways, something no motor vehicle could do (Fig. 4). 14 The rickshaw was also flexible in the sense that it was available at any time and stopped anywhere the passenger wanted, unlike the bus or tram, which had regular schedules and set stops. "When the typhoon season came around," one Westerner wrote, "the rickshaw coolie would cheerfully carry you pickaback from front door to rickshaw, or vice versa, to keep your feet d r y . " 1 5 B y the end of the nineteenth century, rickshaws were already the most common conveyance in the city. 16 Of Shanghai's three administrative jurisdictions, the International Settlement, the core of modern Shanghai, accounted for most rickshaws. In 1900, there were 4,647 rickshaws for public hire in the Settlement. B y 1907, the number had increased to 8,204. 1 7 B y the 1930s, there were more than 23,000 registered rickshaws in operation in Shanghai's streets for public hire, for an average of 1 public rickshaw for every 1 5 0 people. 18 In 1899, the same year that the Willis Bridge survey was conducted, the S M C started to issue licenses for private rickshaws (baoche). 19 In 1907, 5,625 private rickshaws were registered in the International Settlement. 20 B y 1924, of the 19,882 rickshaws registered in the Settlement, 9,882 were private (see Table 4). 21 These private rickshaws were sometimes casually referred to, like public rickshaws, as huang baoche (yellow private vehicles), but they were actually painted black. Although public and private rickshaws were the same type of vehicle, it was certainly easy to tell which was which. Rickshaws for public hire were not only yellow but looked, in general, shabby and tumbledown, although they seldom broke down in the

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Fig. 4. Rickshaws literally provided door-to-door service. Here rickshaw men are waiting for fares in front of an alleyway entrance. Inside the arched portal are rows of attached houses. A grocery store with a huge cotton cloth sign is on the right of the alleyway entrance and a tailor's shop is on the left. A s a rule, stores were lined up side by side on both sides of the alleyway entrance. In neighborhoods such as this, shopping and transportation were always available a few steps away from home. From R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

street. Commenting on these dilapidated-looking conveyances, a foreign observer in Shanghai satirically said that "this [the broken-down appearance of public rickshaws] must not intimidate the nervous, for the stranger will not be long in China without seeing a miracle, that things Chinese (including the government) when in ruins ought to go to pieces, but somehow never do." 2 2 Invariably, it seemed, private rickshaws were always shiny, were carefully maintained, and sported "a spotless white upholstered double seat, a clean plaid for one's lap, and a wide protective tarpaulin to protect the passenger (or passengers, since sometimes up to three people rode together) against the rain." 2 3 While owning a private automobile and employing a driver was an exceptional luxury limited to the wealthiest, to own a private rickshaw and employ a puller for it (or, the equivalent in the late 1940s, to own a pedicab and hire a driver) was a luxury enjoyed by many upper-middle-class families. 24 More commonly, well-off families (both Chinese and Western) had a favorite public rickshaw puller whom they would hire on a regular basis

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of Rickshaws

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Table 3 . R i c k s h a w Fares in S h a n g h a i , 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 3 7

Engaged

by

Distance

First m i l e o r less

1 0 cents

E a c h s u b s e q u e n t Vi m i l e o r less

1 0 cents

Engaged

by

Time

O n e h o u r or less

5 0 cents

E a c h s u b s e q u e n t h o u r or less

4 0 - 5 0 cents

SOURCE: Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 800; Darwent, Shanghai, xiv. NOTE: These were official fares determined by the S M C but never strictly enforced. Actual fares were usually higher; rickshaw pullers and their would-be passengers commonly bargained over fares. In the rickshaw dispute of 1 9 3 3 - 3 4 , many people did not even know there were official rates. See Guo Chongjie, "Shanghaishi de renliche wenti," 1 9 - 2 0 ; Darwent, Shanghai, xiv; Pal, Shanghai Saga, 1 6 8 - 7 0 .

Table 4 . Public R i c k s h a w s in S h a n g h a i , 1 9 3 4

Area

Rickshaws"

Rickshaw

Rickshaw

Firms

Pullers

Hubeib

2,900

805

8,700

Hunan

6,014

1,292

18,042

Huxi

3,124

1,215

9,372

Pudong

1,078

180

2,156

200

175

400

9,990

1,148

39,960

23,306

4,815

78,630

Wusong International Settlement

Total

SOURCE: Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 75. "Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, comp., Shanghai gongyong shiye, 250, gives a slightly different total number of rickshaws in Shanghai in the mid-1930s: 23,335. Other sources (Tim Wright, "Shanghai Imperialists versus Rickshaw Reforms"; Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 266) also gives 23,335 as the number of rickshaws in the Chinese districts. ' H u b e i (North Shanghai) mainly consisted of Zhabei. Hunan (South Shanghai) included the French Concession and Nanshi (the old Chinese City and its vicinity). Pudong included four towns: Yangjing, Tangqiao, Gaoqiao, and Luhang.

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for certain purposes, such as taking children to and from school, shopping, and other regular, short trips. 25 Running rickshaws was a highly profitable business. According to one report, in the late nineteenth century a rickshaw made in Japan sold for $ 1 5 , and the daily rent for a rickshaw (paid by the puller to the owner) was 400 - 600 wen, which was about one-thirtieth the cost of the rickshaw itself. 26 This means that by renting out a rickshaw for a month, the owner could recoup his investment; after that, the profits rolled in. 27 Such quick profits soon aroused the interest of Chinese in the business. After the 1880s, the Chinese were able to make their own rickshaws, and the market price for the vehicle began to fall. In 1898, Chinese started to run businesses (called chehang, lit., "vehicle firms") that rented out rickshaws for public hire in the walled Chinese city. From 1 9 1 0 on, Zhabei, the newly developed Chinese-administered area, also started to have rickshaw firms. Later on, rickshaw firms were established in suburban areas like west Shanghai (Huxi) and Pudong. 28 However, up to the early twentieth century, foreigners still dominated the rickshaw business in Shanghai. The names of large rickshaw companies owned by Westerners—such as Nanhe, Feixing, Huifang, Jicheng—were familiar to Shanghainese. These companies rented rickshaws directly to Chinese contractors, who then sublet the rickshaws to pullers. In this way, of course, the foreign owners were saved the trouble of dealing directly with numerous pullers—"dirty work" in their eyes—and did not have to face the language barrier. 29 The Chinese contractors, known as baotou (subletting heads), were mostly members of gangs or otherwise had some sort of disreputable background. Often, after they had contracted for rickshaws with their foreign owners, they sublet the vehicles to other, minor, middlemen who then sublet to individual pullers. Sometimes more than one layer of middleman was involved; hence names such as "second middleman" (erbao), "third middleman" (sanbao), and so on became part of the jargon of the business. From about the early 1920s on, the Chinese contractors gradually purchased the rickshaws from their foreign owners and took over the companies, although some foreigners still remained the officially registered owners of the vehicles. B y the late 1920s, Chinese had purchased most of Shanghai's rickshaw businesses. The Nanjing decade ( 1 9 2 7 - 3 7 ) saw the peak of the history of rickshaws in Shanghai. B y then the business, from owners to various layers of middlemen to pullers, was purely Chinese. B y the late 1930s, the Chinese could declare that "the rickshaw business is 1 0 0 percent ours." 3 0

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B y the 1920s and 1930s, the rickshaw business had become one of Shanghai's notorious rackets, especially in the International Settlement. The S M C , out of concern about traffic congestion, pursued a policy of limiting the number of rickshaw licenses. In particular, licenses for public rickshaws were strictly controlled. Between 1 9 1 7 and 1934, the number of public rickshaws in the Settlement was almost frozen. 3 1 From September 1 9 2 4 on, the S M C set a cap of 10,000 licenses for public rickshaws, and the cap was kept in place into the 1930s. The limit on the number of licenses and other administrative peculiarities (such as automatic renewal of licenses) created a highly complex "license hierarchy" in the trade. A t the top of the hierarchy were the official license holders, a total of 1 4 4 individuals or companies in the 1930s who registered 9,900 public rickshaws in the Settlement. 32 These license holders paid a nominal fee of $2.00 per month to the S M C (which was increased slightly to $2.20 in the late 1930s), but the actual market value of a license in the 1930s ran as high as $750.oo. 3 3 Since licenses were legally not transferable, many license holders sold or rented their licenses but remained officially registered owners and received regular payments from the license purchasers. According to an investigation conducted by the SMC's rickshaw committee in 1 9 3 3 - 3 4 , only 34 percent of the license holders actually owned and managed the registered vehicles; the rest of the rickshaws were either partially or totally rented out or virtually sold. 34 The average annual net profit from the racket of renting or selling licenses ranged from 1 0 0 to 300 percent, depending on how many middlemen were involved. B y simply renting out the SMC-issued enamel license (which was kept in the vehicle), the profit was 1 0 0 percent. 35 Thus the business of running rickshaws in the International Settlement, from the S M C office down to the actual pullers in the streets, involved multiple layers of license holders, rickshaw owners, contractors, and middlemen, each profiting to varying extents from the racket of renting and buying and selling licenses. 36 A t the bottom of the hierarchy were, of course, the thousands of pullers (Fig. 5). According to the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs, the city had about 80,649 public rickshaw pullers in the early 1930s, each of whom on average supported a family of 4.23. Thus it was that the rickshaw provided a livelihood for more than 340,000 people, or about 1 0 percent of the city's population. 37 A more moderate estimate of the S M C indicated that in 1 9 3 4 in the International Settlement alone about 140,000 people depended on the rickshaw for a livelihood. No wonder the term fu (rickshaw puller) was almost a synonym for the poor. 38

huangbaoche

Fig. 5. Rickshaw men were not always poorly clad and seedy looking. Work uniforms were sometimes provided, and the Shanghai Municipal Council had decreed that pullers must be "decently clad," although the rule was not strictly enforced (Gamewell, Gateway to China, 9 4 - 9 5 ) . It was not uncommon to see rickshaw men like this one, who is waiting on the Bund wearing a Western-type shooting cap, heartily smiling as he faces a camera held by an inquisitive journalist or a curious tourist. Courtesy of Shanghai Municipal Library.

The World of Rickshaws

Rickshaw

/

75

Pullers

In the English-speaking world, Chinese rickshaw pullers were made known, vividly and in some detail, by the translations of Lao She's classic novel, Camel Xiangzi, work, Rickshaw

Beijing.

and, more recently, by David Strand's scholarly Both books are based on the life of rickshaw

pullers in Republican Beijing. Shanghai rickshaw pullers no doubt shared many characteristics with their Beijing counterparts. But there were also some notable differences. The major difference lay in the origins of the pullers. Unlike the rickshaw pullers of Beijing, who were mostly natives of that city (less than one-quarter of them came from the countryside), 39 almost all rickshaw pullers in Shanghai came directly from the countryside, particularly from the rural areas of Subei (also known as Jiangbei, the northern part of Jiangsu province), the source of Shanghai's poorest immigrants. 40 A n article in the popular magazine Dongfang

zazhi used a

straightforward title to indicate that the so-called rickshaw pullers' problem was a "direct result of rural bankruptcy." 4 1 The rural origins of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers were revealed in a number of surveys conducted in the 1930s. A 1 9 2 9 - 3 0 study of 1 0 0 rickshaw pullers in Yangshupu found that only one was Shanghai-born. Of the others, 85 had been farmers who came to Shanghai during famine in their home villages, 9 had come as children with parents who left their villages for the same reason, 2 were former soldiers, and another 2 had come to Shanghai in order to escape gambling debts. 42 A report on the former occupations of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers based on an investigation conduced by the S M C in 1 9 3 4 found that pullers had left the following occupations (number of pullers is in parentheses): farmer (30), cotton mill worker (6), peddler (3), coolie (4), night watchman (4), fisherman (1), boatman (1), carpenter (1), teacher (1). 43 Clearly, the great majority of pullers were former peasants. In addition, those who declared their former occupation to be factory worker, peddler, coolie, night watchman, and so on were often of rural origins. Sometimes peasants who came to Shanghai looking for a livelihood had tried other jobs before they became rickshaw pullers. The main qualification for pulling a rickshaw was, of course, muscle. For the immigrants, pulling a rickshaw was usually not their first choice. Most of the pullers of Shanghai were from the poorest counties of Subei, such as Dongtai, Yancheng, Funing, Gaoyou, and Taixian. Immigrants from the better-off counties of Subei, such as Nantong and Haimen, were a minority among Shanghai's rickshaw men. 44 One author wrote satirically in 1934:

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The destitution of the countryside forced farmers to put down their hoes and plows and turn to the city—Shanghai. But the only skill these people had is farming. Shanghai is the so-called golden land. It is not easy to find a square foot of soil in the city's asphalt streets and cement courtyards. Here, farm hoes and plows were simply junk. So peasants who arrived in Shanghai could not find a [suitable] occupation. The only solution for these people was to pull a rickshaw. There was little skill needed in this calling: one needed only to know [what] the red and green traffic lights [mean], how to get up and down street curbs, and some simple traffic regulations about making a right or left turn.45 Nonetheless, there was competition for this occupation. So many peasants had poured into the city that many of them could not find anything that resembled a job. 46 Few rickshaw men were able to own a rickshaw; most pullers rented rickshaws on a daily basis from a rickshaw firm, and there were always many more pullers available than rickshaws. In the Nanjing decade, the situation was consistently such that 4 or 5 pullers competed for each rickshaw, leaving the majority of the pullers under constant threat of unemployment. 47 To take 1 9 3 4 as an example, in that year in the International Settlement there were 1,009 rickshaw firms, which owned a total of 9,990 rickshaws; at the same time, there were 40,000 rickshaw pullers in the Settlement. Thus on average at least 4 pullers shared each vehicle. 48 There were two shifts in the rickshaw-pulling business in Shanghai: the first from 3 P.M. to 5 A.M. (14 hours), and the second from 5 A.M. to 3 P.M. (10 hours). 49 If each rickshaw was rented 24 hours every day, the maximum number of pullers who could get access to a rickshaw would be about 20,000. This means that at any given moment about half the rickshaw pullers in Shanghai were unemployed. This situation worsened in the late 1930s. In 1939, fewer than 20,000 rickshaws were in operation for public hire, while about 100,000 people were working as rickshaw pullers; thus on average 5 pullers shared each rickshaw. 50 A n investigation found that a "full-time" rickshaw puller on the first shift could work only 1 5 days per month, while the second-shift pullers, 20 days. 51 Naturally, limited work days substantially limited the pullers' income. According to two studies on rickshaw pullers sponsored by foreign and Chinese authorities (SMC's rickshaw committee and the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs, respectively) in 1934, the average monthly income of pullers was $9. 5 2

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Surveys conducted by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs found that the monthly earnings of male factory workers averaged $20 in 1928, and $ 2 5 in 1933- 5 3 In other words, on average a rickshaw puller's income was less than half that of a factory worker. If factory workers, particularly unskilled casual laborers, are regarded as the prototypical urban poor, then rickshaw pullers would seem to have been impoverished. This is in contrast to the rickshaw men of Beijing who were, Strand argues, "poor but not impoverished." 5 4 However, the real life of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers was more complicated than the statistics suggest. In the struggle for a livelihood in Shanghai, a rickshaw puller was always ready to try other jobs. Therefore, surveys that put a person in one occupational category or another could be arbitrary, and income figures based on the category of "rickshaw puller" may not have been entirely reliable. First of all, a puller could always have a second job ( f u y e ) , or, in some cases, pulling a rickshaw itself was his "second job." 5 5 Moreover, if a rickshaw man had a family, it was not unusual for the wife and children to work; their earnings could be a significant part of the family's income. This situation was similar to that of some factory workers in Tianjin who, as Gail Hershatter describes it, "had no fixed occupation, but squeezed themselves into whatever economic niche they could construct, and diversified their source of income by sending almost everyone out to work, or bringing in work to those who remained at home." 5 6 For instance, some rickshaw pullers in Shanghai had a regular factory job, and every day after factory hours they pulled a rickshaw to earn extra money. This practice, colorfully known as "pulling the buttocks of the rickshaw" (la chepigu), was particularly common among casual workers for the simple reason that the income from their factory job was insufficient to support a family. 5 7 Although a factory job was regarded by most people as better than pulling a rickshaw, not all rickshaw pullers agreed. In response to surveys regarding job preferences, some rickshaw men indicated that rickshaw pulling had certain advantages over factory work: first, factory jobs involved long hours (usually 1 2 hours a day or longer) and the work hours were strict, while a rickshaw puller's work hours could be shorter and flexible. The night shift was long, it is true, but it was often shared by two pullers; the second puller was the one who "pulled the buttocks of the rickshaw." Second, the type of job that an unskilled laborer could expect to get in a factory paid about what a man could earn by pulling a rickshaw, that is,

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about $0.40 a day in 1930. This meant that a puller could earn about the same income as an unskilled factory worker, but in less time. Moreover, by the nature of the job, a rickshaw puller could always expect a lucky day when business was especially brisk or when a generous customer paid especially well. On such days, a puller's takings might be double or triple his usual earnings. 58 Obviously, these opportunities did not exist in a factory. Peng Fuyang, a forty-four-year-old rickshaw man, told an investigator in 1930, "I don't want to work in a mill where I can earn only 40 cents a day. I earn more by pulling a rickshaw, and the earnings are not set—if I am lucky I can earn more. In the factory you can never expect more than 40 cents a day." 5 9 Some of the rickshaw men surveyed had actually given up a factory job in favor of pulling a rickshaw. 60 In a typical pattern of migration from rural areas to Shanghai, young male members of a peasant family went to the city first to test the waters, so to speak. If everything went well, it usually took a young man a year or so to settle down in the city. Then he might be in a position to bring the rest of his family. But some immigrants were never able to do so and remained single throughout their sojourn in Shanghai. This contributed to the persistently uneven sex ratio in modern Shanghai. The male-to-female ratio in pre-1937 Shanghai was more than 1 3 0 to 100; by the late 1940s, the ratio was still more than 1 2 0 to 100. 6 1 Lower-class laborers often could not afford to maintain a family in the city. M a n y of them were simply unable to marry at all and remained, in the common term, "single sticks" (guanggun).62 A popular song vividly described the life of a "single stick": Mai Mai Zhu Yue

mi yi ding mao (To buy rice, his cap is the container),63 chai huai zhong bao (To buy firewood, his arms are the container), de mao cao wu (He lives in a straw hut), liang dang deng zhao (The moon is his only lamplight).64

A strikingly high proportion of rickshaw pullers were unmarried. It was estimated that in 1 9 3 9 there were about 100,000 of them working in Shanghai's foreign concessions, of whom more than 60,000 were unmarried or had left their families back in the village. 65 One Shi Zhilin, a thirty-six-year-old rickshaw man who hailed from Yancheng in northern Jiangsu province, typified three aspects of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers: their origins, the pattern of their migration, and their strong family ties back in the village. Shi told his story in 1929: Two years ago because of a lean year in my home village, I came to Shanghai. M y parents have five sons; I am Number Two. M y elder brother works in an electric lamp factory [in Shanghai]. Both my

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Number Three and Number Five brothers are farmers in Jiangbei [northern Jiangsu], M y Number Four brother is also a rickshaw puller in Shanghai. The five of us have already divided the family property [fenjia]. Each of us got 1 3 mu of land. But because of the lean years in Jiangbei, I worked as a rickshaw puller in Shanghai, leaving my wife home to take care of our land. My folks are supported by all five of us. This year the famine in Jiangbei is extremely bad, so my wife has recently come with our [six] children to join me in Shanghai. Our land is farmed by my brothers to support my parents and to help with my brothers' expenses. I do not want the output of the land, but if my parents die I would take the land back.66 For those who brought their family to Shanghai, making a living was a collective effort of the household. In 1 9 3 3 - 3 4 , the Shanghai Municipal Social Bureau conducted a survey of 291 rickshaw families, with a total of 1 , 2 3 0 people. It reported that "except for some feeble persons and little children, most family members have some sort of work to do." Based on this survey, the bureau interviewed a sample of 57 families (245 persons) in detail about the types of work they were doing. The jobs they reported, with number of working persons in parentheses, were rickshaw pulling (71), straw shoe making (23), toothbrush making (12), yarn spinning (16), peddling (9), sorting chicken feathers and fleece (4), gleaning rubber balls to sell (5), laundering (3), gleaning charcoal (1), working in a cotton mill (1), unskilled laboring (3), selling foreign goods (1), weaving (1), and vehicle attending (2).67 This rather diverse list suggests the hardship of, as well as the opportunities for, rickshaw families. On one hand, the variety of the jobs reveals that life was a cooperative, family-based venture for these rural immigrants: every mouth needed to be fed and every possible person had to work. Some of these jobs, such as "gleaning leather balls," were most likely done by children. 68 On the other hand, almost all the jobs were not available in the villages. In other words, the variety of jobs suggested opportunities available only in the city. Even by picking up trash to sell, a child could significantly supplement the family income. It was reported in 1 9 3 6 that 20,000 people in Shanghai worked at "picking up trash" (shihuang). More than 5,000 of these trash pickers were children aged seven to fourteen; daily earnings from selling trash ranged from 1 0 0 to 500 wen. 69 No matter how low these jobs might have been in the eyes of the city's betteroff people, they provided the opportunities that lay at the heart of the city's attraction. The most common combination of occupations in Shanghai's poor

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working-class families involved the husband working as a rickshaw puller and the wife as a textile mill worker. As we have seen, many factories, especially those in the largest industry in Shanghai, textiles, tended to hire women (and girls) for unskilled work. 70 This pattern was significantly different from that in more tradition-bound cities such as Beijing, where women's major occupations were still sewing and washing, and family income was basically whatever the husband earned. 71 A folk rhyme, the "Song of Women Filature Workers" (Sichang niigong qu), poignantly portrayed the difficult life of the woman who was wife, worker, and mother: I rushed out of bed, dressing in the gray dawn. Holding the mosquito net, I turned to see my child: "Oh, baby, you look pained when mother must go out to work." Having just served tea to my father-in-law, I heard the mill whistle blowing. With disheveled hair I wasn't in the mood to do anything, but carrying a round bamboo basket [i.e., lunch box] I hurried to work. It was lucky that the jail gate [i.e., the factory entrance] wasn't closed yet. I rushed to the silk reeling workshop where the hot air stings one's skin —Who would come if not for the sake of money? I worked till noon and fed myself cold rice. I lowered my head and thought of my husband, who, at that time, must be pulling the rickshaw; he must be dripping wet with sweat. My hands never stopped working in the boiling water. The afternoon passed, twilight passed; when I got off work, the street in front of the factory was in deep darkness. I hurried back home and heard my child crying. "Oh, sweetheart, don't ask mama to hold y o u — Mama's whole body aches unbearably. Is Daddy back home from rickshaw pulling? Mama can cook if he brings rice home." 7 2 Some rickshaw pullers were among those immigrants who remained part-time farmers. Men often came to Shanghai and pulled a rickshaw during slack seasons, and then, in busy seasons, went back to their village to farm. 73 They were, as Elizabeth Perry pointed out, "true peasant-workers who kept one foot firmly planted in the countryside while the other ran through the city streets in search of a fare." 7 4 Mary Gamewell, a foreign resident in Shanghai who wrote about life in the city in the second and

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third decades of the twentieth century, told of rickshaw coolies "who come to the city in winter from farms and return to them in the spring." 7 5 These people were mostly from poor Subei counties such as Yancheng and Funing, who had easy access to Shanghai by boat via the Grand Canal. 76 The 1 9 2 9 - 3 0 investigation into rickshaw pullers in Yangshupu found that the farm back in the home village was one of the three major sources of income for Shanghai's rickshaw families (the other two being, of course, the puller's earnings and the earnings of other family members). Some rickshaw men in the survey had as many as 7 - 8 mu of land at home, and some had left their family, including wife, children, parents, and siblings, back in the village. 77 Naturally, these pullers had close ties with rural life. A s Tim Wright has indicated, "Although [by 1934] many Shanghai rickshaw men had been pulling for ten years, such workers were still not entirely divorced from agriculture, and the supply of labor was often seasonal, reflecting the rhythm of rural life." 7 8 If the rather vague occupational lines among the urban poor in Shanghai, in which a rickshaw puller could, for instance, simultaneously be a dock coolie and a casual factory worker or vice versa, reflected the struggle of rural immigrants to eke out a living in the city, then the strong rural ties of these rickshaw men indicate that the struggle to become urbanized could be long and arduous. People like this might best be described as semiurbanites. 79

The Other

Side of the

Coin

The plight of rickshaw men was an oft-told story. Working the streets no matter what the weather, dressed in rags, shod in straw sandals or sometimes simply barefooted, rickshaw men looked to be not better off than beggars. Much of Shanghai's foreign community believed that "pulling a rickshaw is so strenuous that no puller ever reaches the age of fifty and is past his prime at t h i r t y ! " 8 0 It was also rumored among the Chinese that as a rule rickshaw men were short-lived and would "definitely die after seven years of pulling." 8 1 A doctor in charge of a missionary hospital where many sick coolies were sent reported in the second decade of the twentieth century that "a large number of the cases brought in are in a state of collapse due to malnutrition and the bad hygienic conditions of their life superadded to the strenuous spasmodic strain they undergo." 8 2 A life insurance foundation was established by the Shanghai (Rickshaw) Pullers' Mutual Aid Association ( P M A A , or Renliche huzhuhui) in 1 9 3 6 to provide life insurance and disability insurance. Table 5 is based on the report of the first five months of this insurance program. More than 95 per-

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Table 5. Insurance Report of the Pullers' Mutual Aid Association of Shanghai, May 1 , 1 9 3 6 , to September 3 0 , 1 9 3 6

No. of claimants

Disability

Death

5

107 Age at Time of Death Other

No. of deaths

25-29

30-34

13

13

35-39 12

40-44

45-49

19

23

50-54

Ages

12

15

Causes of Death Contagious Epidemic No. of deaths SOURCE:

and

Diseases

59

Digestive Disease 18

Other

Causes 30

Shanghaishi nianjian, 1937:0:36-37.

cent of the claims were for death, and two-thirds of the dead were middleaged. According to the report, the average life span of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers was about forty-three years. 83 The report of the insurance program for the fiscal year August 1 9 3 6 to July 1 9 3 7 listed a total of 240 deaths. The causes of the deaths, shown below with the numbers of deaths given in parentheses, in a sense add up to a profile of the lives of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers: enteritis and gastritis (37), cardiac-renal (6), pulmonary disease, and tuberculosis (58), specific infection (61), eye, ear, nose, and throat disease (1), skin and other pyogenic maladies (6), venereal disease (4), wounds and injuries (9), suicide (4), and miscellaneous (54). 84 The most common causes of death—contagious and epidemic diseases—were prevalent in Shanghai's slums. Most of the rickshaw pullers who had their families with them in the city lived in miserable shantytowns located on the immediate outskirts of the International Settlement. Indeed, rickshaw pullers and their families constituted a major part of Shanghai's shantytown dwellers. 85 Pullers who had left their families in the villages usually lived in dormitories provided by rickshaw firms. These were perhaps the most crowded places in this most crowded city of China. A single, cramped loft often housed twenty to fifty men. 86 Digestive disease was another main cause of death, no doubt the result of

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irregular eating occasioned by the nature of the job and poor diet, which a S M C report described as "extremely bad and rough, without much nutrition, and tasteless." 87 For the fiscal year 1 9 3 6 - 3 7 , the P M A A received 5,499 relief cases; 4,925, or about 90 percent, of these cases were caused by sickness or wounds and injuries. The number of relief cases dropped slightly the next year to 5 , 2 7 1 ; still, about 85 percent (4,504) of the cases were disease and injury related. The most common diseases reported in the P M A A files were similar to the diseases that caused death listed above. But all the miseries of rickshaw m e n — t h e backbreaking work, poor diet, disease, and even the presumably short life—did not prevent peasants from pouring into the city and joining this already much oversupplied labor force. In the short span of five years, from 1 9 3 4 to 1939, for instance, the number of registered rickshaw pullers (excluding many parttime pullers) in Shanghai increased from fewer than 70,000 to more than 100,000; and this was at the time when rickshaws increasingly became a target of social criticism for being "inhuman" and were increasingly restricted by the authorities who wished to limit the use of these "backward conveyances." 88 The lure of rickshaw pulling reflected the social and economic deterioration of the countryside. A s a contemporary author wrote in 1 9 3 5 , "Unemployed peasants abandon the countryside; smiling, they run into the city looking for a rickshaw pulling job thinking they are entering a happy land." 8 9 For Shanghai's rickshaw men themselves, the "better livelihood" in the city was quite evident.

"PHEASANT

RICKSHAWS"

Available sources of information on the lives of Shanghai's rickshaw men are mostly social surveys conducted in the 1930s by the authorities (both the S M C and the Chinese Municipal Social Bureau) and individuals who sympathized with these unfortunate men. 90 Reports of these investigations tended to paint an entirely negative picture of the men's lives. This is largely because of two subjective factors. First, the surveyors were motivated by compassion or by a sense of duty to arouse social concern in order to generate some sort of solution. 91 This led to the second factor: the surveyors (who were officials and intellectuals) tended to look at the pullers' lives from the point of view of the social elite. Unconsciously perhaps, they reported on the rickshaw world in a tone of sympathy mingled with a sense of superiority; the lives of rickshaw men in their descriptions were entirely miserable. If these investigations had been conducted by someone from the villages these pullers had left, the perspective would have been quite dif-

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ferent. 92 Still, parts of these reports, especially some original interview records, present information from the other side of the coin and unintentionally explain w h y countless rural immigrants endured the "miseries" of the rickshaw men's world. Chen Caitu, a sixty-seven-year-old rickshaw-puller, came to Shanghai in 1895 after a lean year in his home village of Yancheng of Subei. Chen, then in his early thirties and married, left his wife in the village. He first worked as a porter transporting rocks for a while and then, with the help of a friend, got a job pulling a rickshaw. According to Chen, the job, which was not too physically demanding, was a turning point in his life: "From then on m y life was better every day. I saved some money, and two or three years later I was able to bring my wife to Shanghai." His misfortune seems mainly to have begun with the family reunion. His wife had bound feet and could not find a job. The couple began a family, and eventually had five sons. Chen could barely feed his family. One by one the children came down with various illnesses and died. 93 The thirty-six-year-old rickshaw puller Shi Zhilin also hailed from Yancheng. Shi was fortunate to have a wife who worked for the Tongxing Cotton Mill, where she earned 1 4 silver dollars a month. All six of his children were healthy and helped supplement the family income. His eldest son, fourteen, worked as a floor cleaner in the Tongxing Cotton Mill, earning 1 0 silver dollars a month; his second son, twelve, was a floor cleaner in the Yihe Cotton Mill, and earned 6 silver dollars a month. To feed these mouths, the family needed 1 5 0 jin (165 pounds) of rice per month, which cost them 1 5 silver dollars. Thus the earnings of the two boys were sufficient to cover the cost of this staple. The family knew how to save every cent. Younger children often went out with their mother to pick up firewood chips for cooking and thus saved the expense of fuel. A t the time of the interview, Shi Zhilin was quite confident about the future. He planned to send all his children to work in cotton mills when they grew up, except for his fourth son, who was, as the proud father said, "extremely smart" and would be sent to school. 94 This kind of optimism was not uncommon among Shanghai's rickshaw pullers. It made them appear to be, according to Rena Krasno, who lived in the city in the early 1940s, "a noble breed: uncowed, independent, deriding Fate with gumption." 9 5 In answer to a curious passenger's question about how a rickshaw man might be successful in Shanghai, a puller replied that there were a number of ways to rise from being a coolie to being comfortable financially (xiaokang): "but in the end," the puller said, "the key lies in two words: hard work and thrift." 9 6 One thing that many desired was to

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be hired as the puller of a private rickshaw. This usually required a reliable sponsor to reassure the hiring family or the master (dongjia) about the puller's background and character. Once hired, the family provided room and board for the puller, plus a monthly wage, which was 5 - 7 silver dollars late in the second decade of the twentieth century and 1 0 silver dollars in the early 1930s. This was about equivalent to the wage of a shop clerk. Tips depended on the family's financial situation or goodwill, but there were always some. Work clothing, including a raincoat, were also provided by the employer. Furthermore, traffic tickets were paid by the employer. 97 A s mentioned earlier, in the early 1920s there were about 15,000 such private rickshaw pullers in Shanghai. 98 B y virtue of "hard work and thrift" (as the rickshaw man commented), plus knowing and practicing certain tricks of the trade, many pullers of private rickshaws eventually managed to buy a rickshaw or even an entire rickshaw firm (chehang). One of the best-known ways for rickshaw men to make the leap from "rags to riches" was to pull a so-called pheasant rickshaw (yeji che or yeji baoche). In Shanghai slang, anything inauthentic or fraudulent may be called "pheasant" (or "wild chicken," yeji).99 Pheasant rickshaws referred to those registered as private vehicles but actually plied for public hire. In a year or so a shrewd rickshaw puller might be able to save 4 0 - 5 0 silver dollars, enough to purchase a used rickshaw that he might register, often under a false name, as a private vehicle. Since there was risk of being caught by the police, these pullers liked to solicit customers in areas where business offices or brothels were located: they could pretend they were private pullers of wealthy businessmen and were awaiting their masters. Since Shanghai policemen tended to carefully check up on public rickshaws but paid only scant attention to private rickshaws, thousands of men in Republican-era Shanghai made their living as pheasant rickshaw pullers. 100 It was said that Shanghai's prostitutes used pheasant rickshaws in particular. B y hiring a pheasant rickshaw, a prostitute might wander the streets, disguised as a proper lady, which gave her a better chance to watch out for a wealthy customer. Once an ideal customer was "caught," the prostitute let the man sit in " h e r " rickshaw, and she herself hired another rickshaw to follow. This way the customer was " s a f e l y " conveyed (it was not easy for him to run away if he changed his mind) to the brothel or wherever the prostitute resided. As a rule, she paid the puller generously. Prostitutes in Shanghai were nicknamed "pheasants"; thus the term "pheasant rickshaw" connoted the nature of not only the vehicle but its riders as well. 1 0 1

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As mentioned earlier, in the International Settlement, where most of the city's rickshaws plied their trade, the S M C restricted the licensing of public rickshaws out of concern for traffic congestion (Fig. 6). In 1 9 3 4 , when registered public rickshaws in the Settlement numbered 9,990 and private rickshaws 1 2 , 7 5 1 , it was estimated that about 20,000 pheasant rickshaws illegally worked the streets. 102 It was common for pullers of private rickshaws to rent out the rickshaw license to the owner of a pheasant rickshaw. Someone who could afford to have a private rickshaw and hire a puller usually did not pay attention to this kind of trifle. Even if by chance a private rickshaw was caught in the street without its license, the master paid the fine and the puller excused himself by saying he had forgotten to bring the license with him. 1 0 3 The next step up from owning a pheasant rickshaw was to own a rickshaw firm. Indeed, for most rickshaw men this was considered the pinnacle of success. According to one investigation in 1 9 3 4 , Pulling a pheasant rickshaw, a man can earn an average of $1.50 a day, or $40.00 to $50.00 a month. He pays a license fee of $3.00 and spends $7.00 for food; thus [at the end of the month] he has about $30.00 in his pocket, which is about an elementary schoolteacher's salary. After two or three years' hard work, he can save $1,000.00, or $500.00 at the least. He can then purchase a number of used rickshaws and rent them out at a monthly rate of $6.00. Now the puller himself can relax. Dressing in a long gown and short waistcoat [the traditional attire of a gentleman], he is no longer a laborer but can assume the airs of a capitalist.104 This picture is by no means unrealistic. Gu Zhuxuan ( 1 8 8 5 - 1 9 5 6 ) , a boss of the Green Gang, Shanghai's biggest underworld organization, started his career as a rickshaw coolie. A native of Yancheng, Subei, Gu came to Shanghai at the age of sixteen. For seven years he worked as a rickshaw puller—first for a wealthy family and then on his own as a puller of a rickshaw for hire. B y 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 , he had saved enough money to buy some rickshaws to rent out. His brother, Gu Songmo, also started his life in Shanghai as a rickshaw puller, and later became one of the ten major contractors (baotou) for the French-owned Flying Star (Feixing) Rickshaw Company, which controlled 350 rickshaws. 105 It was contractors like Gu Songmo who later purchased foreign rickshaw firms in the 1920s and turned the rickshaw trade into a Chinese preserve. Although, as noted earlier, in the official records of the foreign settlements rickshaw licenses were held by only a few firms, in actuality they

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Fig. 6. A rickshaw station on a back-street corner in Hongkou in 1 9 2 3 stood across the street from the Sanjiaodi Food Market (on the right), Shanghai's largest indoor food market, built in 19x6. Note that within this small section of the street are shop signs in Chinese, English, and Japanese. The big bamboo cages on a cart contain domestic fowl for sale; these were usually shipped directly from nearby farms. From R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

were owned by numerous small rickshaw concerns. In the mid-i930s, Shanghai had 23,306 public rickshaws and 4,814 rickshaw firms, for an average of fewer than 5 rickshaws per firm. In the Chinese districts, the average was fewer than 4 rickshaws per firm. Even in the Settlement where rickshaw firms were in general bigger, the average number of rickshaws per firm did not reach 9. 106 That firms were so small reveals that the owner required little capital. Owners of rickshaw firms, as noted, were often former pullers. They were usually "hard working and thrifty" (qinjian) and knew the tricks of the trade. Although not many pullers eventually became owners, still, the success of those who did suggests that there was a degree of social and economic mobility. If the goal of most pullers to become an owner of a rickshaw firm was a dream, a more realistic goal was to hold a "big license," that is, an S M C license. A s the playwright Yu Ling, who lived in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled, as long as a puller was able to have (or more accurately, to rent) a rickshaw license for the International Settlement, his income would be much higher than that of an average

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schoolteacher. This perhaps explains w h y after the outbreak of the SinoJapanese War in 1 9 3 7 some white-collar workers eked out a living by pulling a rickshaw. 107 E D U C A T I O N : A RAY OF H O P E

A s one would expect, rickshaw pullers as a group had little or no schooling. The investigation of 1 0 0 rickshaw men in Yangshupu in 1 9 2 9 - 3 0 found none could read; the only literate person was Zhang Baoding, a rickshaw company owner. 108 In another, citywide, survey of 304 rickshaw men, 26 (8.55 percent) were classified as "able to read quite well," 1 2 0 (39.47 percent) as "literate," and 1 5 8 (51.98 percent) as "illiterate." 1 0 9 The low rate of literacy in no way made rickshaw pullers unusual in a nation that had hundreds of millions of illiterate citizens. Official statistics showed that in 1 9 3 6 - 3 7 , China had a population of 286,332,536 illiterates; the proportion of the literate, even by a generous definition that included "all those who had been enrolled on schools at one time or another regardless of the length of attendance," was merely 23.4 percent of the total population. 110 Yet the great esteem that Chinese society has for education was also a part of the rickshaw pullers' culture. Shi Zhilin's plan of having his favorite son receive a school education reflected the mind-set of rickshaw pullers in general. Ying Wengao, another puller who lived in Yangshupu, expressed great regret for being illiterate. A t age forty-three, this rickshaw man still spoke with resentment about his deceased father, an opium addict who sold all the family property for drugs and never provided schooling for his children. Ying was determined to have his children educated, and had managed to send his eldest son to school for a few years. 1 1 1 Men like Shi and Ying can be seen as a representative of the deeply rooted tradition that values education as the most important (if not the only) way to climb up the social ladder. And in both cases, the men gave hope to the younger generation. Here, the city stimulated and supported such hope. A favorite plot in Chinese literature and popular drama was the (ultimately successful) struggle of a son of a poor family, who, by studying hard, passes the imperial civil service examinations and goes on to win a higher degree. 1 1 2 But such romantic stories rarely had a peasant as hero. Rural life in general provided little stimulus for the ambition, or, perhaps more likely, such ambition was defeated because it was too remote to be achieved. 1 1 3 In any case, once in Shanghai, poor immigrants found that their views on education and life began to change. The city placed opportunities—almost flaunted them—right before their eyes. But to seize these opportu-

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nities usually required some sort of education or skill; hence these former peasants felt the pain of illiteracy, something they had never felt before, or at least not to such a degree, in the villages. Indeed, these rural immigrants ended up pulling a rickshaw precisely because they were uneducated and unskilled, as virtually all social surveys on Shanghai's rickshaw pullers revealed. 1 1 4 This naturally provoked the desire for education—in particular, education for the younger generation in order to break this "karma of poverty." 1 1 5 The city not only provoked bitterness for being illiterate; it also offered opportunities for learning that the villages simply could not provide. In a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, an illiterate rickshaw puller would usually learn to read at least some street signs and numbers, both the Arabic and traditional Chinese numbering (immeasurably useful for recognizing addresses), and pick up some pidgin English (useful when dealing with foreigners). 1 1 6 But the opportunities went beyond that. The Pullers' Mutual Aid Association of Shanghai, founded in 1 9 3 3 , provided educational facilities for its members, all free of charge. 1 1 7 The P M A A sponsored seven schools for children of rickshaw pullers and adult school for the pullers themselves. Each branch office of the P M A A had a reading room that subscribed to most major newspapers and pictorials. A s a rule, a tea room for relaxation was connected to the reading room. The P M A A also had mobile libraries, each with more than five hundred books. 1 1 8 These facilities were well used. In 1 9 3 7 - 3 8 , the reading rooms were visited 273,592 times by patrons, and the libraries 1 0 1 , 5 0 3 times, for a daily average of 750 patrons for the reading rooms and 278 for the libraries. 1 1 9 In short, rickshaw pullers enthusiastically received these services. No official enrollment figures were recorded for the schools, perhaps because many students attended irregularly. But monthly attendance was impressive: a total of 4,744 attended in August 1 9 3 7 , just before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, which devastated Zhabei and Nanshi, where a number of these schools were located. The enthusiasm for education, moreover, was not extinguished by the war: three schools inside the International Settlement continued classes during the war, with 400 students regularly enrolled. B y July 1938, class attendance reached more than 8,000, almost double the prewar level of attendance. 120 Such enthusiasm for education was actually a tradition among the pullers. In 1927, when for the first time Shanghai's rickshaw pullers organized their own union, which attracted more than 300 members in a few months, the organization set itself the goal of providing its members with

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a basic education. B y that, the organization meant members would learn to read (shizi). m In the late 1940s, when the P M A A had deteriorated significantly, it was still operating four schools for the children of pullers, with more than 500 students and eleven teachers. Ironically, in the mid-i930s, when the plight of rickshaw pullers had drawn much public attention, the welfare dispensed by the P M A A was criticized for being insufficient; in the postwar era, the PMAA's programs, which had largely disappeared, were nostalgically recalled as part of the "good old days," and the P M A A , with its once-vibrant school system and other services for pullers, was regarded as "the best of Shanghai's labor unions" prior to 1 9 3 7 . 1 2 2 " B E A S T S OF B U R D E N "

Pulling a rickshaw has been described as "running like cows and horses" [niu ma ZOM).123 Naturally, the muscle and energy demanded by the job favored the young and healthy. The investigation conducted in 1 9 3 4 by the Shanghai Social Bureau found that 7 1 percent of the rickshaw pullers surveyed were between the ages of 26 and 45; the average age was 35.5. 1 2 4 A n other survey, conducted in 1930, found that 94 percent of the pullers were between the ages of 20 and 40. 1 2 5 However, pullers over the age of 50 —sometimes considerably over that age—were also fairly common in Shanghai. For instance, Chen Caitu was laid off at age 59 by the rickshaw company for which he had worked for twenty-seven years. But he still managed to rent a rickshaw from a fellow from his hometown (tongxiang), Zhang Dingbao, who owned a rickshaw company and continued this "running like cows and horses" work into his sixties. 126 Another rickshaw man had just started his "urban career" at the time of his interview in 1 9 3 0 — a t the age of 62: I am now 62 years old. M y native place is Yancheng, Jiangsu. M y family had five or six mu of land, but all of this land was on the coast of the East [China] Sea. It is now all inundated with the salt water of the ocean. In Jiangbei [Subei], I was a tenant and also farmed my own land. But this year there is a famine there, so I, together with my wife, son, and daughter, came to Shanghai looking for a livelihood. Because of my age I could not find a suitable job. I asked Zhang Baoding, who is my tongxiang and an acquaintance, to let me pull a rickshaw, and he agreed. If the policemen see me they would not let me do the work. I therefore have to work in the evening pulling a pheasant rickshaw, which means that each time other pullers are going to end their shift, I go ahead and talk nicely with a puller and ask him to do me a favor by let-

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ting me pull the rickshaw for two to three hours, usually from 9 P.M. to midnight, and this way I do not have to pay any rent [for the rickshaw]. When I pull a rickshaw, I wear a big black cap which covers my face leaving only my two eyes uncovered so that I can see the road. Disguised in this way, policemen and customers cannot figure out my age. Each evening I can earn .20 to .30 xiaoyang ["small dollar"]. If I earn some money, we can eat rice, otherwise we can only have gruel. M y wife is too old to work. My daughter, who is only ten, is too young to work. My son is fifteen. He is still too young, but, since every mouth in the family needs to be fed, I have sent him to work as an apprentice with a bricklayer—no pay, merely free board. The house where I am now living belongs to somebody else. The landlord is sympathetic because of my age and lets me live there for free. 127 The age of 60, known in China as reaching the "cycle" (huajia), was considered very old in those days. 128 Yet, in 1 9 5 5 , when Shanghai's rickshaws were finally eliminated, the average age of pullers was 5 5 - 6 0 , and the oldest pullers were 77. Some had been rickshaw pullers for more than thirty years, which meant they started pulling in the 1920s. 1 2 9 A t the other extreme, child rickshaw pullers were also frequently found on the streets. In 1 9 3 5 , this became such an issue that the Shanghai Public Safety Bureau banned the practice for the sake of the "health of children and safety of passengers." 1 3 0 In another depressing case, a one-armed man had made a living in the Settlement pulling a pheasant rickshaw. The son of a rickshaw puller, this unfortunate lost his right arm at the age of nine. Wrestling with his playmates one night, he fell down and broke his arm. Bungled treatment by Chinese physicians brought no relief of the pain and eventually led to the amputation of the fractured arm in "a hospital of the 'redhaired man' type" (that is, a hospital run by foreigners, most likely a missionary hospital). A s an adult, despite his handicap, the man still had to work to live. Following in his father's footsteps, he took up rickshaw pulling. B y 1934, he had already pulled a rickshaw for eight years. According to L. Z. Yuan, a columnist for the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury,

" M r . Single-Armed Puller," as Yuan called the man, "has ad-

justed himself to his calling in a perfect manner." The puller had worked out his own technique for managing a rickshaw: he grasped the left shaft with his left hand and tied a cord fastened to both shafts around his waist, which helped him pull the vehicle. He usually worked after dusk in the socalled amusement park rush so that his handicap might go unnoticed by

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discriminating patrons who might otherwise turn away. Yuan found the puller "quite willing to talk. In fact, he is proud of himself" for being, as he claimed, the only one-armed rickshaw puller in Shanghai, if not the whole country. 1 3 1 The SMC's new rickshaw puller's licensing legislation, which went into effect on March 1 , 1 9 3 4 , was ominous news for Mr. Single-Armed Puller. The legislation required the 40,000 pullers plying the Settlement to be registered in the S M C office (and to pass a physical examination and have their photograph taken) in order to obtain a license. 132 The one-armed puller made no attempt to hide his anxiety over the new regulations. "But he still is plucky," Yuan observed. "The world is never too small for a man who is willing to work, he declared. There you have thousands of cities in China where one may pull a ricsha to earn a living, he said. His immediate plan is to work in Chapei [Zhabei], Nantao [Nanshi] and [the] French Concession^] where a pullers' license is not necessary—if he is not allowed to work in the International Settlement." 1 3 3 To be sure, it was a callous society that pitied the weak and disadvantaged but did not help them. In fact, Yuan's story was sensational and seemed calculated more to entertain the reader than to arouse compassion. But the fact that the aged and even the handicapped were, no matter how reluctantly, able to pull a rickshaw for a livelihood for a number of years raises the practical question of just how debilitating this job was. Recall that it was widely believed that the rickshaw puller faced not just a miserable life but a short one. In fact, the "professional" life of a rickshaw man, it was said by one source, did not last more than five years. 1 3 4 The idea that pulling a rickshaw was a death sentence sprang mainly from the everyday image of a ragged, sweat-soaked coolie pulling a corpulent, richly dressed customer. This slavelike image was particularly offensive to the eyes of the "gentlemen" who came fresh from the West with the notion that the rickshaw was the classic example of the backwardness of the Orient. M a r y Gamewell described how rapidly this fastidiousness disappeared. "It is interesting," Gamewell wrote, "to see how quickly a fresh arrival from the West accustoms himself to ricsha riding. A t first he is apt to inveigh against man-drawn vehicles, or if he gets into a ricsha, to sit lightly on the seat, with perhaps one foot hanging out at the side, with the idea of helping the coolie along, but presently he abandons himself to the enjoyment of the little, easy-running carriage, or as one enthusiastic woman described it[,] 'a grown-up's perambulator,' and almost ceases to think of the puller as a human being." 1 3 5 When it came to concern for the poor rickshaw puller or saving a few cents, most people were not bothered

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about being a little hypocritical. Wang Yingxia, wife of the well-known writer Yu Dafu ( 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 4 5 ) , recalled that her frugal husband preferred to hire a human-drawn vehicle, either a rickshaw or a wheelbarrow, because they were cheap. Yu particularly liked to hire aged pullers, believing that old men knew that they were physically weak and thus would not overcharge the passenger. 136 For many years there had been talk about the rickshaw being an "inhuman" and "backward" vehicle, and that it should be eliminated. 137 But such talk concerned mostly the "uncivil street scene" that revolved around the rickshaw, with little real care about the pullers or the pragmatic problem of what to do about the thousands of men who would have been put out of work if the rickshaw were banned. Without a real solution for the livelihood of the thousands of pullers, calls for abolishing rickshaws can only be regarded as cheap talk. In fact, in spite of the song and dance, the rickshaw competed with motorized vehicles and served as one of the major means of public transportation in Shanghai for well over half a century. 138 The decline of the rickshaw in the 1940s was essentially not the result of social reform but of a technological innovation: the advent of the pedicab. The pedicab appeared on the streets of Shanghai in 1942 and by 1946 or 1 9 4 7 had pretty much replaced the rickshaw. 139 Among the many reasons accounting for the persistence of humandrawn vehicles in Shanghai was that the physical demands on the puller were in fact not overwhelming. Indeed, pulling a rickshaw was less physically demanding than many other forms of coolie labor such as cargo loading and unloading (especially on the docks), brick or rock transporting, boat towing, and many others. Shanghai's dock coolies, for example, commonly carried about 200 pounds of cargo on their shoulders. 140 And pulling a rickshaw was less physically demanding than manhandling other humandrawn vehicles common in Shanghai. A handcart coolie, according to the Shanghailander John Pal, "most of the time, is called upon to put about four times the poundage per square inch into his daily toil than required of a rickshaw coolie when plying for hire. The wheelbarrow-pusher, on his part, raised steam to the tune of six or seven times that of the rickshaw coolie." 1 4 1 One must also bear in mind that, as noted earlier, rickshaw pulling was not necessarily a heavier job than farming. Lai Qigeng, a former rickshaw puller, said that he considered rickshaw pulling a light job because in his home village in Taixing, Subei, he used to carry a 250-jin (276pound) load on a bamboo pole balanced on his shoulder, as he hobbled along the narrow ridges between fields. 142 While some foreigners—and Chinese too—were uneasy about riding

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in a rickshaw, more sober-minded ones shared the point of view of the journalist Ernest Hauser, who observed that "pulling a rickshaw, in itself, is not a hard work. Rickshaws are constructed cleverly. They have a builtin balance that takes care of the puller's weight from the waist up whenever he pulls a normal-sized passenger. That gives the legs a lot of independence and, on a downhill pull, the coolie's feet seem hardly to touch the ground." 1 4 3 John Pal had even tried pulling a rickshaw himself: To rickshaw-runners of quite ordinary physique, trundling a rickshaw offers very little hardship. It is merely a matter of "balance", as I have tried and discovered. I once lost an election wager and by way of payment had to drag a newspaper colleague the full length of Nanking Road by rickshaw in broad daylight, wearing an opera hat and holding a twelve inch cigar in my mouth all the way. Once the shafts have been raised, the weight of a passenger is transferred to the wheels and, after a good heave and a trot, the rickshaw runs itself on level ground. And in most of China's great cities, particularly the treaty ports, the ground is very level. Shanghai's highest "hill" was merely an arched stone bridge in the centre of the city across the celebrated Soochow [Suzhou] Creek, where there were always strong Chinese urchins waiting to grasp the shafts and help haul your rickshaw over the hump for a couple of coppers.144 Perhaps such accounts can be dismissed as mere anecdotes. But not the research of Adolph Basler, the director of the Physiological Institute of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Basler undertook meticulous research on the energy expended by the rickshaw man and published the results in New York-based Science magazine. Based on his observations on rickshaw locomotion in busy streets and his application of mechanics to the observations, Basler found that when pulling a rickshaw under normal street conditions, the double step of a puller was from 4 to 6.5 feet and the number of paces per minute varied between 76 and 87. Basler pointed out that the design of the rickshaw was such that during motion the center of gravity was over the axle, which required the puller to exert no force upwards, but allowed him to apply all his power to pulling. Thus, once inertia was overcome and the rickshaw was rolling on level ground, the puller needed only to overcome the resistance of friction. In line with other data on frictional resistance, pulling an occupied rickshaw required overcoming a resistance of 4 to 1 1 pounds, depending on the nature of the ground. Basler concluded that both the amount of external work per minute and the duration for which it could be maintained were the same as if the puller were drawing a cord over a pulley, the end of which was fastened to a weight of 4 to

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1 1 pounds, which required exertion "less than that of the Egyptians who lift water from the Nile, while themselves standing still, or that of French navies ascending a ladder." 1 4 5 These observations, no matter how solidly based they were, could easily run the risk of being criticized as unsympathetic, or, in the Maoist idiom, as "bourgeois anti-working class nonsense." 1 4 6 A Chinese proverb, "There is no light load if one has carried it for a hundred paces" (baibu wu qingdan), may also be quoted to justify such criticism. But two facts must be noted here. One is that most rickshaw pullers did not work every day but every other day; thus each day of labor was balanced by a day of rest. The other is the generally short distance of the typical rickshaw trip. As we have seen, the limit on the number of licensed rickshaws made fifteen or sixteen shifts per month the normal full-time work load for a puller. And on average, "pulling a rickshaw for one day earned two days of livelihood." 1 4 7 Although, as we have also seen, sometimes factory casual workers pulled the "leftover" shift or "the buttocks of rickshaw" to supplement their income, all of the intensive surveys on rickshaw pullers conducted in the 1930s mention nothing about pullers getting other unskilled work during their off hours. 148 Practically speaking, this every-other-day work schedule allowed a puller to rest and get ready for the next shift. As for the typical trip by rickshaw being quite short, this was related to the layout of the city and the availability of a good system of public transportation for longer trips. In particular, after the introduction of trams, trolleys, and buses early in the twentieth century, rickshaws were mainly used to get to places not easily accessible to mechanized conveyances. 149 Given the physical layout of Shanghai, many destinations were located in small, winding streets and narrow alleyways. The International Settlement covered only about 8.7 square miles (22.60 square kilometers). The French Concession was merely 3.9 square miles (10.22 kilometers). 150 From the Bund at the east end of the Settlement to Bubbling Well Road on the west end was barely 3 miles. Most rickshaw trips were less than this distance. 151 From the North Railway Station in Zhabei to any part of the city was considered a long-distance trip, and many rickshaw pullers were unwilling to take a customer that far, although from the railway station to most parts of the city was less than 3 miles. 1 5 2 The divided city administration of Shanghai made long-distance trips impossible for many pullers. There were three types of licenses for public rickshaws in Shanghai. The first type was obtained by registering in the Settlement. A s mentioned earlier, the S M C restricted the number of licenses to a total of 8,000 in 1 9 2 0 and 9,990 in the 1930s. Those who pos-

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sessed an SMC license had the privilege of paying additional fees to obtain licenses permitting the rickshaw to ply the French Concession and the Chinese districts. Pullers commonly called these "big licenses" (da zhaohui).153 The second type (known as "small licenses," xiao zhaohui) permitted the rickshaw to work in both the French Concession and the Chinese areas but not in the Settlement. There were 1,800 rickshaws with such I 934- The third type was valid in Chineselicenses in 1920, and 6,014 administered areas only. Two thousand rickshaws had such licenses in 1920 and 7,302 in 1934. 154 The Chinese licenses were further divided into those valid in Zhabei only and in Nanshi only; additional permission and fees were required for plying the railway station. Thus most rickshaws in Shanghai operated in one or two areas. If the passenger's destination was in another area, he or she would have to alight from the rickshaw at the boundary and find another, suitably licensed, rickshaw. For example, if a passenger hired a rickshaw (with a small license) in Avenue Joffre in the French Concession and wanted to go to Nanking Road in the International Settlement, upon arrival at the Great World (Shanghai's most popular entertainment center) the passenger had to alight and find a rickshaw with a "big license" to take him or her the rest of the way. This of course inconvenienced the passenger but helped ensure that most rickshaw trips would be short. 155 Those who investigated the living conditions of rickshaw men complained of the difficulty of interviewing pullers since it was hard to find them at home. From what we have seen, we know this was definitely not because pullers worked inordinately long hours. On the contrary, most pullers found themselves with ample free time on their hands. When not working, rickshaw men often went out to teahouses or bathhouses for relaxation, dropped by neighbors' homes for a chat, or simply stayed home and slept. 156 Gambling was the foremost popular entertainment for rickshaw pullers. A card game known as puke (a name derived from poker) and mah-jongg were especially popular. These games could be played anywhere, but most often were enjoyed with a few neighbors or friends gathered in one's home. Outside the home, the teahouses frequented by rickshaw pullers offered a relaxed place to chat, gamble, or listen to Suzhou storytellers. 157 Opium addiction was also common among rickshaw pullers, partly because, it was said, they needed the drug to unlock the energy required in their job. Cheap and inferior opium was always available for sale in many of the city's back alleys. 158 The squalid opium dens that peppered rickshaw pullers' neighborhoods were usually full of men sleeping off the effects of their

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indulgence. 159 It was estimated that in the second decade of the twentieth century 20 to 30 percent of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers were opium addicts, and that they typically spent 70 to 80 percent of their earnings on the drug. 160 A variety of entertainments for the poor was also available literally on the street corners. For instance, a homesick puller could easily cheer himself up by attending Jiangbei opera, which was often performed in open spaces in the city's back streets. Shanghai was crawling with itinerant entertainers of all sorts; in the popular parlance, such people made their living by "eating the rice of the rivers and lakes [i.e., they were vagrants]" [chi jianghu fan) or "eating rice by opening the mouth" (chi kaikou

fan).

Their audiences were of course any passersby, but most were laborers who found street entertainment to be to their taste, available anytime, and affordable—no ticket was needed and the entertainers only collected donations after the show. Although itinerant entertainers could be found anywhere in the city's busy commercial districts and crowded working-class neighborhoods, they gathered at a few popular spots in particular. The entertainers who regularly performed on the Rue Hennequin (An'nanjin Road) in the French Concession, for example, caused the place to be nicknamed "The Great World of Subei" {Jiangbei gesting that this was the "Great World" (Dashijie)

dashijie), a name sug(Shanghai's foremost

popular entertainment center; see Fig. 9 in next chapter) of the poor. 161 Also in the French Concession, a few blocks southeast of the Great World and the Bridge of the Eight Immortals (Baxianqiao), was perhaps the largest open-air entertainment area in Shanghai. Streets running off the Rue Soeur Allegre, the Rue de Peres, the Rue de Saigon, Ningpo Road, and others were full of many different types of popular divertissements. 162 One could find monodrama (dujiaoxi), comic dialogue, storytelling, Chinese and Western magic shows, conjuring, sleight of hand, sung stories accompanied by a drum (dagu), flower-drum songs (huaguxi, a popular north China form), stunt cycling, modern drama (huaju), peep shows (Xiyangjing),

puppet plays, sword play, tightrope walking, animal fighting,

fortune-telling (shuo yinguo),

qigong (breathing exercise) shows, sword

swallowing, fire eating, monkey shows, freak shows, and various types of "talking and singing" shows (shuochang). Almost all types of entertainment offered in the more fashionable amusement centers in the city could also be found here, as well the "lower-class" type of diversions that were unavailable elsewhere. And, just as some commercial streets in the city specialized in a certain product or service, popular entertainments were clustered by type in one or another section of a street, making a tour of a

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few streets very much like wandering in the Great World. 163 Every day from noon to late evening, such places were full of working-class people or, as they were called by a more bookish but fashionable name in the 1930s, the puluo (proletariat). 164 In sum, the design of the rickshaw, the puller's limited working hours (which allowed rest and recreation), and the short-distance service in one way or another explain w h y many rickshaw men could work for decades without collapsing and w h y some aged men were still able to pull a rickshaw for a living. The relatively manageable physical demands of pulling a rickshaw and the little skill required may also explain, at least partially, the lure of this calling for the tens of thousands of unskilled rural immigrants who flooded into the city. These factors may provide a context for appreciating some street scenes described by contemporary witnesses, which were not entirely gloomy but somewhat upbeat. "The green light is switched on," an author wrote of an everyday street scene in Shanghai in about 1940. "The rickshaws start dashing on like Marathon runners. They try frantically to beat the motorcars by a length before the next red light stops them again. Often they succeed, winding their way through the traffic that handicaps the bigger vehicles in their progress. That is the coolies' f u n — then they can laugh and joke and tease the uniformed conductors of official traffic." 1 6 5 Was this observation a rare scene portrayed by an indifferent bystander? It seems not. Rena Krasno, a Russian Jew whose family had lived in Republican Shanghai for many years, recorded in her diary in March 1944 an almost identical and even more cheerful picture of rickshaw pullers: "Before the [Pacific] War, rickshaw men often laughed, joked, and dashed like marathon runners, surging forward when the traffic light turned green. They had fun trying to outwit bicycles, motorcycles, and carriages and concentrated their strength upon moving swiftly forward, weaving cunningly through Shanghai's disorganized traffic." 1 6 6 FLEECING THE

CUSTOMER

Rickshaw pullers' fleecing of passengers was a classic example of the cheating and extortion that prevailed in modern Shanghai. According to a popular, if not universal, stereotype, rickshaw pullers often cheated or overcharged customers, especially those who did not know the city well. The fleecing of passengers, or in Shanghai slang, qiao zhugang (lit., knocking with a bamboo stick), was an all-too-common tale. On one hand, since the great majority of pullers came from Subei, this stereotype reflected the

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general bias against Subei people in Shanghai. 1 6 7 On the other hand, that fleecing was in fact common may well have contributed to the bias against Subei people in the first place. Virtually all guidebooks on Shanghai published in the 1930s, if they had a section on rickshaws, warned readers of devious rickshaw pullers. In due time, the stereotype of the dishonest puller became a part of the city's culture—like the multilayered crime, vice, shady deals, and gangsterism that made modern Shanghai world famous as a city of sin. Like taxi drivers in many cities of the world who unconsciously serve as a window through which new visitors get their first impression of the people of the city, the thousands of rickshaw pullers who plied Shanghai streets day and night were one of the most visible incarnations of the city's culture. A sophisticated Shanghailander, or what was known as an "old Shanghai hand" (lao Shanghai),

having a sound knowledge of the streets and the

structure of fares, was unlikely to be cheated. But fledgling riders and newcomers who did not know Shanghai well were ripe for the picking. B y a customer's accent a rickshaw puller could easily identify who had long been in Shanghai and who had not. In spite of their rural origins and ties, and although many of them were often regarded as "country bumpkins," rickshaw pullers were snobbish toward newcomers from the hinterlands. Pullers tended to disdain "hinterlanders" (waidiren) or simple "country folk" (xiangxiaren), disregarding the fact that many were not from a rural background at all. 168 The common and uncomplicated ways of cheating were exactly what one might imagine. A rickshaw puller might charge double or triple the normal rate, or he might intentionally take an unnecessarily roundabout route in order to secure a higher fare. Since by custom the fare was paid at the end of the trip, when the customer wanted a roundtrip a puller might agree to a low fare at the start, but at end of the trip insist that the fare be doubled because, he would say, the price he gave was for a one-way trip, only the customer had misunderstood him. 1 6 9 Even after paying, a passenger might still be swindled. A trick known as the "switch" (diaobao) or "shifting money" (diao yuanbao) was one of the commonest flimflams. Rickshaw pullers sometimes carried a counterfeit silver dollar made of copper with silver-plating. When a passenger paid the fair and was about to leave, the puller quickly switched the counterfeit coin for the passenger's authentic silver dollar. The puller would then shout, "Hey, the dollar you gave me is a fake." The real coin was hidden in the puller's jacket, which had a cleverly hidden hole underneath the third button. If a suspicious passenger questioned the puller's honesty, the puller

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would unbutton his jacket and ask the customer to search him as he pleased. But no one could ever find the hidden coin: as the puller was opening his jacket with one of his hands, he naturally grasped the garment right over the spot where the coin was hidden. Pullers might also hide money in the tarpaulin or the sidelights of the vehicle. If a rickshaw puller was lucky, he could use this ruse to "shift" as many as twenty dollars a day. Few customers knew the trick and, since counterfeit money was quite common, they tended to accept the puller's claim. 170 It was also inescapable that rickshaw pullers took advantage of certain situations to charge unreasonable fares. For instance, it was customary that at the end of a visit, a hospitable host would hire a rickshaw as a courtesy for the guest, especially if the guest was a woman or was elderly. Unless the host had negotiated a fare out of the presence of the guest, the puller would always ask for a higher price because he knew very well that a host would not want to haggle in front of a guest. Often the guest would insist on paying, and the host and guest would then politely "struggle" over who would pay. On such occasions, naturally the puller would eagerly demand a high fare. 171 In other ways, too, pullers took advantage of the customs of polite society. One writer described what happened to him when he disembarked from a ship at the dock of the Chinese Bund in the Nanshi district in autumn 1937- 172 The "petty bourgeois," as the author derisively called himself, could not find a taxi, and although he had only a small suitcase, he knew that it was improper for a gentleman to trudge down the street carrying a bag. The rickshaw pullers knew this too. The traveler approached one of them: "Rickshaw! To the French Concession!" "Three dollars!" the rickshaw puller answered in a snobbish tone as if he were insulted by being hired. He then told [the traveler] that a war was going on, clearly implying that he would take advantage of the situation. No matter what the destination, "three dollars" was the minimum. Why should you expect him to be fair? In Shanghai, the hooligan's world, nothing is fair.173 A Chinese author, using the pen name Biweng, exclaimed that the "pure and innocent" nature that pullers brought with them from the countryside was distorted by the prosperity of Shanghai. For instance, a customer who needed a rickshaw urgently (because of, say, a medical emergency) or who had heavy luggage rarely escaped the clutches of the unscrupulous puller. By the same token, rainy days were always good business days for pull-

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ers. "Rickshaw pullers," Biweng wrote, "are always soliciting your business, but when it is raining, it is perhaps your turn to solicit them. In that event, the puller may ignore your call, lowering his head, pulling an unoccupied rickshaw and pretending he doesn't hear you. This is their tactic—after this pretense you won't be able to negotiate the fare. When you loudly call him back, he first glances to see if you are wearing leather shoes or have an umbrella. If you don't have either, it is time for him to fleece you and demand what fare he will." 1 7 4 Knowing how to negotiate a rickshaw fare was virtually a must for the people of Shanghai. As a rule, before climbing into the rickshaw, the would-be passenger "had to state his destination almost to the exact yard, and sometimes the travelling directions required plenty of clarification before the puller would commit himself. He required a clear mental picture of the spot where his fare intended to alight. Having got this he then named his fare, and the next few moments generally developed into a walking argument along the curbside until one or the other gave way. Only then did the journey begin." 1 7 5 Invariably it seemed, pullers asked an unreasonably high take and passengers retaliated by "chopping the price in half" (sha banjia); that is, the passenger's first offer was only half of what the puller asked. From this bottom line the fare was negotiated. But even after the two parties reached an agreement, the journey did not always end without further arguments over the fare or destination. The puller might stop a few yards or a couple of blocks short of the destination and say that this was where he thought the customer wanted to go. Whether this was the result of a misunderstanding or a deliberate trick on the part of the puller, or of the passenger, an argument might ensue. John Pal, a longtime resident of Shanghai, graphically portrayed what could happen next: 1 7 6 "You said this is where you wanted to go," he would say to the fare, emphasizing the remark by dropping the shafts of the rickshaw to the ground. The fare most probably countered by retorting: "You're mistaken. It's another couple of blocks further on." "I'm not mistaken," the coolie would splutter back. "You cheated me." "I didn't cheat you. You're probably some country bumpkin who doesn't know this city very well." "I'm a third generation rickshaw-runner in this place and I don't like being cheated." "You're a fool. No one is trying to cheat you. You haven't yet reached the place I told you."

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"Don't call me a fool! This is as far as I'm taking you for the twelve coppers we agreed upon. So hand me money and let me get about my business, or shall I call a policeman?" "I'll pay you when we reach the place I said." "Well, I'm not taking you a yard further for twelve coppers. If you want to pay fourteen coppers I'll take you two more blocks. If not, pay up and let me go." Such arguments were likely to end up in victory for the puller: the fare either paid the difference or got off the rickshaw and walked to his or her destination. Even if the argument proceeded to the point of bodily assault, which was not uncommon if the fare was a man, a third party would always come out to mediate, saying something like one should not get into a haggling match with a coolie, or other words intended to make peace, and to end the unpleasantness the passenger would pay up. 1 7 7 Disputes like these seldom occurred if the customer was a foreigner. As a rule, foreigners (or more accurately, Westerners) paid more than Chinese did, 178 not just because they "leaned to the side of mercy" but also because in general they were heavier than Chinese and usually asked the puller to run faster than did Chinese. 179 The Shanghai rickshaw man usually did not negotiate the fare with a foreigner in the first place. All he needed to know was "Where go, marster?" 1 8 0 The author Biweng complained that in the busiest commercial sections of Nanking Road or in front of theaters, " y o u can never hire a rickshaw unless you pretend that you are a rich man (kuolao) who will ride without negotiating the fare. But if you happen to be walking with a foreigner, your chance of getting a rickshaw is even smaller, because [the coolie's] whole attention is concentrated on the hope of pulling this foreign God of Wealth (yang caishen)."181

Foreigners also noted

the pullers' preference for Western customers. "Time and again when on the lookout for a public rickshaw I came upon one in the throes of arranging a contract with a Chinese," Pal wrote. "In a flash all negotiations were broken off and the rickshaw placed at my feet with a grin and a 'Where to, marster?'" 1 8 2 But to the pullers' dismay, there were different kinds of waiguoren

(for-

eigners). Worthless (xialiu) foreigners sometimes paid little or even nothing, rushing into a foreign-owned firm, hotel, bar, dance hall, home, or other place where a fierce and arrogant doorman or policeman would bar the desperate puller's way. 1 8 3 A s early as December 29, 1874, only a few months after rickshaws had started operating in Shanghai, two foreigners took a rickshaw to Sanyangjing Bridge at the northern boundary of the

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French Concession and left without paying; when the puller tried to collect his fare, one of them threatened him with a knife. 1 8 4 This was just the earliest instance of foreigners' bullying of pullers in Shanghai. Most of those who refused to pay were foreign seamen. In a number of cases reported in the 1930s and 1940s, pullers who insisted on getting their fare were brutally beaten or even killed; without exception the bullies were seamen from England, Spain, Italy, and America. 1 8 5 The most publicized case involved Zang Dayaozi, a forty-three-year-old rickshaw man who, on the night of December 22, 1946, took a Spanish seaman on a five-mile ride from Hongkou to the former French Concession. The sailor refused to pay; when Zang insisted on his fare, the seaman's companion, an American bluejacket, struck and killed Zang. The incident quickly became headline news nationwide, especially since it symbolized the Nationalist government's impotence in dealing with Western outrages in China. 1 8 6 Zang Dayaozi was one of the few rickshaw men who had the nerve to argue with foreign toughs. Zang actually waited for hours in front of the Anlegong (lit., palace of peace and pleasure) dance hall where the Spaniard had entered, and approached him after he had had enough fun and was drunkenly staggering out of the building. But in this treaty-port city, Zang's nerve and anger only led to his tragic death, after he had pulled a rickshaw in Shanghai for twenty years. 1 8 7 Most pullers did not dare insist on their fare from a foreign tough who refused to pay—most likely they would do no more than spit or curse. This was partly because of the language barrier no doubt, but even more because of the general awe with which foreigners were regarded. Biweng once nastily denounced what he believed to be rickshaw pullers' blind worship of foreigners: "Their knowledge is so superficial that they only know that all foreigners are rich. They can't even tell who are the Jews (who are much stingier than the Chinese) or the White Russians (who do not have a nationality and are even poorer than the Chinese). They treat them all like people from England and America. They are so silly that they just bend down in front of the foreigners like a hen trying to mate! They are full of pidgin English—nonsense like Maida-mu [Madame], Mai-si-dan [Master], li-ke-xi [rickshaw]. It just makes you laugh." 1 8 8 Since the majority of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers came from Subei, Biweng's attack can be seen as part of the popular prejudice against Subei people; or, conversely, the concentration of Subei people in rickshaw pulling and their everyday presence on the streets can be seen as contributing to such prejudice. 189 In all fairness, revering the West, or

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(worshiping things foreign), was part of the city's culture; rick-

shaw pullers' preference for foreign customers was just an undisguised part of that culture. To some extent rickshaw pullers were not ignorant but well informed. Plying the streets of the "Paris of the East," they witnessed a great many aspects of life in the city and daily heard its rhythms. Their job involved dealing with a variety of people: negotiating to rent a rickshaw from an owner or a middleman, bargaining with customers, arguing with the police, chatting with friendly or talkative customers along the way. Pullers were, as a local saying had it, people who "know the market and situation" (ling shimian),190

and they were much more cosmopolitan than, say, factory

workers, who in their twelve-hour daily shifts were confined to a dark workshop and probably talked with no one. That Zang Dayaozi had the gumption to demand his fare from a foreigner was perhaps related to the deterioration of the position of the foreign powers in this treaty-port city: first as a result of the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement and the French Concession in December 1 9 4 1 , which was followed by the abolition of the foreign concessions in 1943; and second, as a result of Japan's defeat, which occurred only a year before Zang's murder. Biweng's indignant comment on rickshaw pullers' blind subservience to all foreign passengers might have been well grounded in December 1940, but it became less accurate after the outbreak of the Pacific War. In March 1944 a Russian Jew commented that "rickshaw coolies are insolent, aggressive, almost threatening, knowing full well that foreign customers are powerless today. The few that still lord it over the rest—the Germans and other Axis members—are usually sufficiently well off to use chauffeured motorcars. In any case, after years on the streets the coolies can quickly differentiate between foreigners, knowing almost instinctively whom they can harass without fear of retribution." 1 9 1 This comment and that of Biweng were written only three years apart, but they convey startlingly different images. While subjectivity (if not bias) to some extent always enters into observations such as these, the differences in this case may also reflect the fact that rickshaw pullers in Shanghai were not as ignorant and benighted as commonly thought, but were informed and quick to size up the situation. Rickshaw men were compelled to "know the market and situation" in order to survive. In this regard they were not different from any other social type in the city—say, the astute businessman whose plush offices overlooked the famous British Race Course at the center of the city or the shrewd street peddler who regularly set up his stand in a corner of the old

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Temple of the City God in Nanshi. The most significant aspect of the story of the rickshaw was that this simple vehicle had transformed peasants into "petty traders" who, with their muscles as their only commodity for sale, daily involved themselves in endless marketing (soliciting customers in the streets) and bargaining (over the fares with customers and over the rents with rickshaw owners). Like anyone else who entered the market for business, a rickshaw man was compelled to play his role actively, seek his opportunities wherever they lay, and stand firm for his rights. He had to deal with people of all walks of life in a "cash business" every day. In his home village he might have been a tenant farmer, selling labor to a landlord. In the rickshaw business, however, the intense bargaining, the diversity of the clientele, and the frequent business opportunities were beyond the wildest imagination of a rural inhabitant. Thus the former peasant had to quickly shed his simplicity in order to become part of the challenging yet promising urban life. In short, in this highly commercialized urban society, rural immigrants were made into petty traders of all sorts. In turn, these "small potatoes" became the true brickwork of the commercial world and its culture we call "Shanghai."

CHAPTER 3

Escaping the Shantytown

Modern Shanghai was often described by romantic sobriquets such as "the Paris of the East," "the bright pearl of the Orient/' and "a paradise for adventurers." 1 The stylish architecture on the famous Bund and Nanking Road served as a proud symbol of this great metropolis. Much less noted was another, darker and less romantic, aspect of urban growth in modern Shanghai: that is, the countless filthy straw huts chaotically thrown together into dozens of shantytowns. From the plate glass windows of the skyscrapers in the bustling downtown area, virtually wherever one looked one's eyes fell on "the Orient's most scrofulous slums." 2 It is proper to say that, like the Bund skyline, the shantytowns were a symbol of modern Shanghai, or, as Emily Honig has put it, "another of Shanghai's distinctive worlds." 3 B y 1 9 5 0 Shanghai's squatter areas were home to roughly one-fifth of the city's population. The overwhelming majority of the shanty dwellers were rural immigrants who, in the sense that they now lived in the city and eked out a meager existence by various callings that were available only in the city, had become urban. But the incredibly congested and miserable living conditions of the city's shack settlements and the high unemployment and underemployment rates there made their inmates, in the eyes of other people of the city, "urban outcasts," in the sense that they were unsettled rural immigrants. For these people, factory jobs were highly coveted but almost beyond reach. Industrial workers, who are generally regarded as constituting the majority of slum residents in modern industrial cities, formed merely a minority of Shanghai's shantytown dwellers. W h y were the large shantytowns of China's largest industrial city not predominately inhabited by industrial proletarians? This question leads us to the matter of the social stratification among Shanghai's factory workers. 109

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While temporary employment in the form of a low-paid factory job could not save a rural immigrant from the fate of squatting in a shack neighborhood, those who managed to obtain stable and better-paid factory jobs fled the shantytowns and settled in the city's "average" neighborhoods, where the middle and lower-middle classes lived. Thus, the search for one's niche in the urban structure—or, as the Chinese put it, the search for "a place to stick an awl" (li zhui zhi di)—resulted

in comparatively unusual residen-

tial patterns. The patterns of where people lived, and the contours of their material, social, and cultural lives, render the conventional category "industrial worker," or proletarian, a gross oversimplification.

A Museum of Global

Architecture

Modern Shanghai was a city rich in architecture style. Not surprisingly, imposing Western-style edifices made up some of the city's most eyecatching landmarks. Merely a decade after the city's opening as a treaty port, the Bund featured a mile-long string of European-style buildings. B y the 1920s, the influence of British, American, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, and Dutch architecture on Shanghai architecture was obvious. Imitations of European architectural styles ranged from Roman classic, baroque, and Renaissance to modern and contemporary designs. The urban landscape was further embellished by Japanese-style structures and even by a few Islamic-style buildings. M a n y of these imported styles were modified by or integrated with elements of traditional Chinese design, making eclecticism the order of the day. A t the same time, traditional Chinese architecture survived. Less than a mile south of the Bund were the authentic Chinese structures of the old city, as well as the classic Ming-dynasty garden, Yuyuan, completed in 1 5 7 7 by the Confucian scholar Pan Yunduan for entertaining his parents (Fig. 7). 4 " A museum of global architecture" (Wanguo jianzhu

bolanguan)—another

thet applied to Shanghai—well matched the reality.

epi-

5

When it came to housing, a wide variety of types was available, depending on one's tastes and pocketbook. Like most places in the world, the neighborhood in which one lived, and even the style of one's residence, reflected one's status. In general, residential dwellings in Shanghai can be divided into three broad categories: Western-style houses, alleyway houses, and shanties. Each category subsumed a variety of types (or subgroups) that differed in one way or another from each other but nevertheless shared some common distinguishing characteristics. Western-style, or foreign-style, houses (yangfang), as the name implied,

Fig. 7. This teahouse at the center of the old Chinese city was built in 1 7 8 4 . Known among the Chinese as the "pavilion in the middle of a lake," and among Westerners as the "willow-pattern teahouse," this edifice and its zigzag bridge have together been a symbol of Shanghai's old Chinese city since the late nineteenth century. From R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

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referred to European-style detached, multifloor homes with a front garden. Hence this type was also known as a "Western-style garden house" (huayuan yangfang).6

This was by far the most luxurious type of housing

in Shanghai; many such houses were truly extravagant even by Western standards of the time, and, like extravagant homes elsewhere in the world, they often served as proud symbols of the city. They were, however, largely irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people. The second category consisted of a sort of terraced house known as the alleyway house (lilong), the homes of the majority of Shanghainese. From the early 1870s to the late 1940s, alleyway houses were built in abundance all over the city. The quality of any particular house depended on how much skill and money the builders wished to invest, and over the years the design was modified in various ways, but the essential characteristics of the lilong—a row house that combined both European and Chinese features, usually situated within a gated compound—remained unchanged. Most of the alleyway houses built before 1 9 3 5 were known as shikumen

(roughly

translatable as "stone portal," a name derived from the design of its front door; see for example the design of the front door of the pawnshop shown in Fig. 8). Shikumen are the single most common residential housing type in twentieth-century Shanghai. 7 Competing with shikumen were the so-called new-style alleyway houses (xinshi lilong), which came on the market in the early 1920s and soon made shikumen old-fashioned (hence the latter also came to be known as the "old-style alleyway house"). Most of the new-style alleyway houses were built between 1924 and 1938. One of their most distinguishing features was that the front door could have a variety of patterns and often reflected European taste, so to speak. This was in contrast to the plain (and somewhat monotonous) front door of shikumen, which was always two planks of wood set within a stone or concrete framework. Inside, the new type of house had sanitary fixtures (such as bathtubs and flush toilets), which most shikumen houses lacked. The new-style alleyway house also usually had steel-sash windows and polished (waxed) wooden floors; these could not be found in the shikumen house, which made do with wooden sash windows and floors painted in deep red or dark reddish brown. Thus, in time the new-style alleyway house came to be known as

gangchuang

ladi (steel-sash windows and waxed floors). Some alleyway houses featured a tree-lined front garden and a garage at the back lane and were regarded as a type of yangfang (foreign-style house); these were known as "garden alleyway houses" (huayuan lilong).

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Fig. 8. This shikumen housed a pawnshop named "Perpetual Prosperity." The gigantic characters on either side of the entrance read DANG (Pawn), a standard pawnshop sign in Shanghai, usually painted in black on a white wall. People commonly pawned clothing and jewelry, but a sign on the wall shows that this pawnshop also accepted high-quality wooden furniture. Courtesy of Shanghai Municipal Library.

These exquisite homes were definitely the elite of alleyway houses. Yet another type of elite home, known as "new-style apartments" (Xinshi gongyu), referred to either buildings with large, multistory apartments, or new-style houses built as flats. Often, in a compound of new-style alleyway houses, the front row facing the street was built in the apartment style, and the inside rows were built in the alleyway-house style. M a n y of these luxurious homes were erected in the 1940s as a result of Shanghai's wartime prosperity. The third category of Shanghai dwellings consisted of bungalow-type, single-story houses (pingfang)

and straw shacks. The single-story house

originated in the countryside (and it remains the most common type in rural China). In Shanghai such houses were built to serve as factory dormitories or dwellings for the poor. The inferior structure of these houses did not allow construction of a second floor, and the houses often lacked running water and electricity. Most of them were composed of a single room or, sometimes, a single room divided into a few compartments by wooden boards. If the structure allowed, a loft might be built under the

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roof. These houses were found particularly in Yangshupu, Zhabei, and Caojiadu, that is, the industrial areas of the city. They were also found in large quantity in Pudong (on the east side of the Huangpu River). 8 Mixed with the single-story pingfang in poor neighborhoods were straw shacks. A single-story house was made of brick nogging (a rough brick infill within a wooden frame) and had a tile roof, while a straw shack was a thatched hut constructed of no more than bamboo, straw, and mud. But both types were considered inferior and no more than slum dwellings. All these different types of residential housing intricately coexisted in this metropolis. Although there were no rigid boundaries between the areas in which each particular type of housing was found, a general picture of the distribution of housing in the city can be drawn. The west and southwest corners of Shanghai contained the city's best residential areas. Most of the yangfang and new-style alleyway houses were found here. Along Bubbling Well Road (today called Nanjingxi Road), the major thoroughfare in west Shanghai, and stretching all the way to Yuyuen (Yuyuan) Road and up to Jessfield Park (today's Zhongshan Park) on the northwest edge of the city, there were numerous new-style alleyway houses and high-quality shikumen. To the south of Bubbling Well Road, along the tree-lined Rue Lafayette (today's Fuxingzhong Road) and Avenue Petain (today's Hengshan Road), and in their vicinity, were gathered most of the city's yangfang. These areas were part of the International Settlement and the French Concession. Foreign control gradually spilled over the boundaries of the two concessions and extended into the adjacent Chinese-administered areas, creating so-called "extra-Settlement roads" [yuejie zhulu), in which fine homes were built. One of these areas was in Hongkou north of Szechuan (Sichuan) Road, where numerous new-style alleyway houses were built in the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, luxurious Victorian and Spanish-style villas and cottages spread out westward in the extra-Settlement areas toward the suburb of Hongqiao. The eastern district (west of the Huangpu River and east of Tibet Road) encompassed the commercial areas of the city. Together with tall buildings and large mansions built mainly for business purposes, many residential buildings (mostly shikumen houses) were built here, forming a jagged, interlocking pattern of residence and commerce (Fig. 9). This was the core of the city: much of Shanghai's political and commercial culture emerged here. The northeast (mainly Yangshupu), the north (mainly Zhabei), and the northwest (mainly Caojiadu) areas of the city were industrial zones. Here were found a mixture of shikumen houses, single-story houses, and straw

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Fig. 9. The Great World, Shanghai's most popular amusement center, was established in 1917. This four-story structure with a European-style tower was a remodel of the center undertaken in 1929. It housed ten multifunction theaters, an open-air central stage primarily for acrobatics, a dancing hall, and a skating rink. It also had a variety of bars, teahouses, shops, corridors, and gardens. Although people of all walks of life found this place entertaining, most of its patrons were "little urbanites." The Great World attracted fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand customers daily and was the largest amusement center in Republican China. A few blocks beyond the Great World, street entertainers performed before pedestrians. From R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

shacks. In the southern part of the city, mainly the old town seat of Shanghai county and Nanshi (lit., Southern Market), there were some traditional Chinese-style houses left from the last century, straw shacks, and single-story houses, but most of the residential structures were of the shikumen type. In short, with a few exceptions, the distribution of the types of dwellings in Shanghai followed a pattern: the best housing (Western-style houses and apartments, and new-style alleyway houses) was in the western part of the city, and the poorest housing (single-story houses and straw shacks) was in the peripheral areas, while the middle-level housing (the shikumen or old-style alleyway houses) was spread all over Shanghai proper. 9 Despite this variety, finding a place to live remained the foremost problem for a newcomer. One old Shanghailander, Cheng Guohua, who came

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with his uncle in 1 9 3 3 from their hometown of Taicang, Jiangsu province, to Shanghai to "learn business" (xue shengyi), was quite lighthearted about the situation. "The most pressing thing for us was, upon stepping off the train at the Northern Railway Station, to find a place to stay," Cheng recalled. "When you walked on the streets, there were houses of every type everywhere, but we could not afford to rent a single room in an ordinary house. After a few weeks searching in vain for an affordable home (meanwhile we stayed with a relative), I wished I had just been a snail carrying its shell on its back, so I could roll myself up in there at night. Probably many people felt the same way. Eventually m y uncle managed to rent a pavilion room [a small room above the kitchen of an alleyway house] in Nanshi, and I was hired as an apprentice in a hardware store that provided lodging—just a loft above the shop, where I always had to be careful not to hit m y forehead on the rafters." 1 0 The Chengs were among the myriad people who ventured into the city in search of a livelihood, but they were far from being unfortunate. For many, as we will see, the "shell" in which to roll up in at night in this "museum of global architecture" was no more than a filthy shantytown straw hut.

Shantytoxvns Unlike the slums of twentieth-century America, which have been associated with the inner city, slums in Shanghai were all peripheral, often located along the boundary of the city's foreign settlements. 11 Imagine the British Race Course (now People's Square) as the center of an oval stretching 5,000 meters (about 3 . 1 miles) east to west and 3,000 meters (about 1 . 9 miles) north to south. Virtually all of the city's shanty dwellings could be found on the circumference of that oval. 1 2 Their peripheral location reveals what we might call the superfluous nature of the slums and their occupants. At least from the viewpoint of the majority of Shanghai urbanites who were settled in more "decent" areas of the city, the shantytown dwellers were uninvited outsiders and the outskirts they occupied were a blight on the city. 13 Likewise, the shantytown inhabitants felt that they were denied entrance to the life of the inner city. To some extent, it is more accurate to describe those who lived in Shanghai's shantytowns as homeless people rather than as ghetto dwellers. A l though there is no complete agreement on the definition of "the homeless," most would agree that someone who is "on the street" or in temporary emergency shelters is homeless. 14 B y these criteria, the shantytown occupants were a Chinese version of the homeless. The Shanghai po-

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lice forces, which were composed of four different foreign and Chinese authorities, pursued an injunction against the "loafer" population in order to keep the city "clean." 1 5 To the authorities in Shanghai, only beggars were street people. In the early 1930s, when the city had a population of more than 3 million, according to one report there were barely 3,000 homeless beggars in Shanghai. 1 6 A t the same time, the city generally lacked public emergency shelters. But there was no lack of homeless people. They were simply driven out of the inner-city streets to squat on the immediate outskirts of the urban areas. The shacks there could barely be called "homes." A s Peroff points out, "In less developed countries, sizable segments of the population live in permanent conditions that are much less adequate than the living conditions provided in the emergency shelters of the United States." 1 7 Shanghai's shantytowns were, in that sense, the home of the homeless. But there is always the danger of drawing a forced analogy when one tries to find a Western counterpart for a Chinese social phenomenon. In twentieth-century America, unemployment has been the primary cause of vagrancy, living as a tramp, and social deviance—the conventionally recognized types of homelessness. 18 In China, however, unemployed people huddled in shantytowns. The great emphasis in traditional Chinese culture on the family and home probably reduced the number of people who truly lived on the streets. More important, however, are the causes behind the scene. Unlike homelessness in America, which has been mainly a social problem associated with America's ethnic heritage, the shanty squatters in Chinese cities reflected something quite different: the gulf that separated rural from urban China. Moving from a rural community to urban society, especially to a large metropolis like Shanghai, was (and still is) most widely considered by the general public in China as a form of upward social mobility. 19 "To go to Shanghai" was analogous to the pursuit of the "American dream" by immigrants to the United States. Although hundreds of thousands of "Shanghai dreamers" ended in crude shacks, the allure of the city never faded. 20 The majority of the shantytown residents, in spite of their poverty, at least survived in the city. Their fate had they remained in the villages—in times of famine and w a r — m a y have been worse. Without the Communist takeover in 1949 and the forceful policies prohibiting migration afterward, shantytowns in Shanghai would most likely have continued to grow. 21 The existence of the numerous and teeming shantytowns in modern Shanghai therefore illustrates the coexistence of two sharply distinctive worlds— rural and urban China—in a single Chinese city.

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Y A O S H U I L O N G : T H E E M E R G E N C E OF S H A N T Y T O W N S

Scattered shack settlements could be found in nineteenth-century Shanghai, mainly in the suburbs along the Huangpu River. 22 Large shantytowns were a later phenomenon: they began to appear on the immediate outskirts of the city late in the second decade of the twentieth century, in conjunction with Shanghai's industrialization during World War I, and spread quickly thereafter. 23 As noted in chapter 1 , immigrants to Shanghai in the second half of the nineteenth century were, generally speaking, mostly well-off merchants, absentee landlords, frustrated bureaucrats and literati, skilled workers, and adventurers. 24 The tidal wave of rural immigrants to Shanghai, which gave rise to large shantytowns, was a twentieth-century phenomenon. B y the end of the 1940s, the whole city was encircled by numerous clusters of straw-hut settlements. In order to gain a clear picture of how these shack areas grew and evolved, let us begin by examining Yaoshuilong (lit., Lotion Lane), Shanghai's largest shantytown. Yaoshuilong was located on what had been a desolate field on a bend of Suzhou Creek, about five miles northwest of the Bund and Nanking Road, the commercial heart of the city. Beginning in 1920, a slum gradually formed around a lotion factory, which gave the place its name. 25 During and after World War I, many textile mills, chemical factories, machinery factories, and kilns were built in Huxi (west Shanghai) where Yaoshuilong was located. The proximity of these factories made this once-deserted riverside an ideal spot for a compact residential community of factory workers and urban poor. A t the end of the 1930s, Yaoshuilong already had about 5,000 households, or 10,000 inhabitants. B y the end of the 1940s, it encompassed almost 1.4 million square feet (about 130,000 square meters); there were 16,000 residents living in 4,000 dwellings, most of which were straw shacks. 26 Most pioneer residents of Yaoshuilong, like virtually all other slum dwellers in Shanghai, were from the countryside. The difficult experience of these people who sought to settle in Shanghai can be traced by what we might call their "housing solution" in this area. Usually, immigrants from the countryside passed through three stages in their struggle to find shelter in the city. The emergence of Shanghai's shantytowns paralleled the struggle. Numerous peasants came to Shanghai via the Grand Canal on small wooden boats commonly known as maomaochuan

(lit., capped boats). 27

These wooden boats with reed roofing crowded along the banks of Suzhou

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Creek. M a n y were berthed for years on the river and served as homes for these newcomers in their first stage of becoming "urbanites" in Shanghai. When a boat became too decrepit to stay afloat, the family that lived aboard would pull the leaking craft onto the river bank, thus beginning the second stage of their residence in Shanghai. They would either live in the grounded boat, or sometimes, when the boat was simply too far gone to serve as shelter, they would use material from the old boat's roof to set up a hut on the muddy ground of the bank. These dilapidated and shabby huts were known by a most romantic name: gundilong

(lit., rolling earth drag-

ons). Probably this name arises from the Chinese homophones "dragon" {long) and "cage" (long), since the huts were virtually cages for human beings. These dwellings were so crude that it is hard to classify them into shapes. Roughly speaking, there were two types of gundilong. One was formed by bending reed mats from an old boat roof to form a semicircular hut; the other was formed by tilting together a bunch of thin bamboo strips or mats to form a triangle. Since the huts were made of these insubstantial materials and their owners could not afford to erect posts or walls within them, neither of the two types of gundilong could be larger than a king-size mattress or taller than an average human being. 28 Nevertheless, it was just these kinds of tiny "rolling earth dragons" that sheltered thousands of the new immigrants in the city. For these squatters, a straw shack (penghu) was a great improvement and was, moreover, perhaps the best type of dwelling they could reasonably expect to acquire. 29 After years of hard work, a family might be able to save up a bit of money and build a straw shack. The average cost of materials for a typical straw shack in the 1930s was about $20, which was equal to about 1 3 5 pounds of rice, enough to feed a family of five for a month, or about one month's wage for an average semiskilled factory worker. A shantytown family could not afford to hire a carpenter, but had to do all the construction work by themselves; at most they might get some help from neighbors. A shack could be erected in two or three days. The difficult part was to manage the cost of materials, which was often met through loans. It was a happy moment when a rolling earth dragon was torn down and a thatched shack built in its place. A straw shack usually consisted of a single room, about 1 2 feet wide by 24 feet long. But straw shacks less than 1 0 feet square were also very common. 30 Bamboo was most commonly used for the main structure. The posts were bamboo; the walls were bamboo wattle plastered with mud. The roof consisted of a few bunches of straw. A piece of lumber salvaged from

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a wooden boat often served as the door, but sometimes the "door" was merely a straw curtain or a ragged piece of cloth. Straw shacks were built directly on the muddy ground, which served as the floor. Glass for windows would have been considered the height of luxury, and many straw shacks had no windows at all. 31 A survey of housing conditions in Yaoshuilong in 1 9 5 1 found that among the 4 , 1 9 1 houses investigated, 1,020 — about a quarter of the total—had no windows. 32 For the residents of these shacks, the usual solution to the need for a window was to knock a hole in the wall. This was presumably easy to accomplish since the walls were very thin. However, the primitive structure of a straw shack more often than not did not allow such "construction work" because it might lead the already weak wall to collapse. So, many straw shacks did not even boast a hole for ventilation. The shack thus was inevitably dark and damp and stank of mildew. Even on clear days no light was admitted if the door was closed; during the rainy season the interior was nearly as wet as the street outside. There was, however, hardly any place within the slum that could be properly called a "street." Yaoshuilong, like all other slums in the city, was a crowded place full of grounded boats, rolling earth dragons, and straw shacks. The houses, if they can be called that, were built without control, and since the slum became more and more crowded in the 1930s and 1940s, any space that could hold a straw shack was soon occupied. The remaining spaces served as lanes that were often so narrow as to barely allow two men to pass shoulder to shoulder. Moreover, many straw shacks were so decrepit that they had to be leaned against one another in order to avoid collapse. Thus, walking through the slum was rather like negotiating an obstacle course. As one walked, one would have to bend down to pass under low eaves, and jump dozens of bumps and potholes. No matter what the weather, it was impossible to pass through a slum without muddying one's shoes. Conditions in Yaoshuilong were typical of those in the city's shack settlements. In 1 9 3 2 some sociologists investigated an unidentified slum in Yangshupu and reported conditions that in all aspects were familiar to Yaoshuilong residents: In the housing study we included a number of huts of the very poor which are made of very inflammable materials such as matting, straw, bagging, old boards, and the like. . . . These dwellings are not rainproof nor wind-proof, and therefore are not sufficient protection from the rigors of Shanghai's variable climate. After a heavy rain, the inmates may be observed walking about in water perhaps up to their knees, while children are placed on the bed in order to keep them out

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of the water. Even after the sun comes out, the inside of the dwelling remains wet for many a day. Mud walks are built up outside and finally in some instances the level of the floor is lower than the land outside the hut. Sanitary conditions are bad, garbage and sewage being left uncovered. No public facilities are used by these dwellers, even though on a main road a few yards away there may be a sewerage system and garbage collecting service. Many of these dwellers in huts of straw are fond of keeping pigs as an investment, pig-pens being placed right next to and adjoining the huts. Chickens are prevalent and at night sleep under the beds. Odors of decaying garbage, excreta of pigs, or dirty dampness pervade the atmosphere in the vicinity of these human habitations.33 A s this statement suggests, scarcely any public utilities were available in Shanghai's shantytowns. Although the inhabitants of Yaoshuilong lived in close proximity to the luxurious and modern facilities of this great metropolis, they were separated from water and power services. No electric service was available in any of the slums in Shanghai. Just as in the villages, kerosene lamps were still the only source of artificial light. Also, it was difficult for the slum residents to get access to running water. Where potable water was available, it was often controlled by thugs and became a source of income for them. In Yaoshuilong there were only two public water taps, which were shared by more than 10,000 of its residents. The taps were controlled by a handful of local gangs popularly known as the "ten shareholders of running water" (zilaishui shidagudong).

These gangs

raised the water price several times higher than market price; thus the majority of the Yaoshuilong residents could not afford running water. 34 Fire hydrants on the streets at the margin of shantytowns were usually objects of contention. Having thousands of people forced to share one fire hydrant led to daily disputes and violence over access to the water. 35 As late as the 1960s, when all the major slums of the city had been renewed under government programs, the polluted and noisome Suzhou Creek still served as the main source of water for the daily needs of some of the remaining slum dwellers—drinking, washing, and cleaning chamber pots, all were done at the same riverside. 36 FANGUALONG AND

ZHAOJIABANG:

S H A N T Y T O W N S C R E A T E D BY W A R

The formation of squatter communities in Shanghai was directly associated with population growth. In the decade after 1927, 1 . 2 million people were added to the population of Shanghai; most of this growth was ac-

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counted for by immigration from the countryside. 37 The population continued growing during the Sino-Japanese War ( 1 9 3 7 - 4 5 ) and the Civil War ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 9 ) as refugees from virtually everywhere in the nation poured into Shanghai, a wartime safety zone. As a result, in the 1930s and 1940s straw-hut slums mushroomed and, at the same time, housing conditions there worsened. In the immediate neighborhood of the North Station (Beizhan), Shanghai's primary railway station, was a large shantytown known as Fangualong (lit., Melon Alley), which might be considered typical of the slums created as a result of wars. Fangualong covered some 1 8 acres (about 70,ooo-odd square meters) immediately south of the railway line between the North Station and the East Station (Dongzhan, which was about half a mile east of the North Station). About 20,000 people lived in this area in the late 1940s. The average living area was only 4.1 square yards (3.5 square meters) per capita. 38 The rise of Fangualong was directly related to the fate of Zhabei, where the slum was located. The first three decades of this century saw the growth of Zhabei, a new and moderately prosperous district often cited as evidence of Chinese capability to create and govern a modern urban area in this largely foreign-controlled city. 39 The ongoing boom in Zhabei, however, was nipped in the bud by the two wars waged by the Japanese in 1 9 3 2 and in 1 9 3 7 . On January 2 8 , 1 9 3 2 , Japanese troops attacked Shanghai, starting a month-long battle generally known as the Song-Hu War (i.e., the Wusong and Shanghai War). Since the central part of Shanghai (i.e., the foreign settlements) was under the protection of the Western powers, the war was fought in the north and northeast suburbs of Shanghai, which were under Chinese jurisdiction. Zhabei became the main target of the Japanese troops. For two weeks after the battle started, Japanese bombers attacked Zhabei almost daily. Thousands of bombs pounded it into ruins. It was estimated that 68 percent of the total loss suffered by Shanghai in this battle occurred in Zhabei. In the whole of the district, according to a field report immediately after the war, there was not a single house that survived unscathed. 40 Zhabei was never to recover, although some efforts at "urban renewal" were made by the Chinese government. A second blow dealt by the same enemy extinguished any hope for the revival of Zhabei. On August 1 3 , 1 9 3 7 , Japanese troops attacked Shanghai again and, after two months, finally occupied the whole city except for the International Settlement and the French Concession. For the second time, Zhabei was severely bombarded by Japanese aircraft and artillery. This time, fighting raged for more than two months.

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Thereafter the Japanese army, when it occupied Zhabei, set fire to whatever structures remained standing. Zhabei was thus thoroughly devastated. 41 The Fangualong slum appeared between these two wars. Although it was located in this war-ravaged area, Fangualong still had some attraction for the urban poor. First, it was, as noted, in the immediate neighborhood of the Shanghai Railway Station, which, for decades after it was established in 1908, was the main entrance to Shanghai. The area directly surrounding this railway station became a sort of a dumping ground on which were cast the teeming crowds of newcomers who sought shelter in this strange city. Furthermore, Fangualong, like any area near a railway station that serves as a key entrance to a great metropolis, provided a number of job opportunities (as porters, rickshaw pullers, and other types of coolies) for unskilled and newly arrived immigrants. Also, Fangualong was located in an area just outside the northern boundary of the International Settlement and was only loosely controlled by the local Chinese authorities. This situation created a sort of administrative vacuum which, to some extent, was conducive to the appearance of a slum. In addition, the bombs of 1 9 3 2 had created a wasteland; with landmarks gone, it was often difficult to tell where one lot began and the next ended. Ownership of real property, in other words, became unclear, making it relatively easy for poor people to squat without permission or paying rent. Not only in Fangualong but elsewhere on the periphery of Shanghai, poor immigrants just squatted on tiny scraps of land and erected their huts. 42 In general the rent for a piece of land on which to erect a straw hut was relatively easy to manage, which was the primary reason that poor immigrants could at least hang on in the city without being literally homeless. In most cases, land was jointly rented by a number of dwellers. A typical contract surviving from the early 1920s describes terms for one piece of land: for leasing a half mu (one-twelfth of an acre), the tenants paid $200.00 annual rent; the land was leased by twenty-one households to erect huts that would house about one hundred people. This meant an average monthly rent of $0.79 for each household. 43 In the 1930s, the normal rent for about 4 square yards (3.3 square meters) of land, the size needed to build a straw shack, was $ 1 . 0 0 per month; sometimes the tenants could even obtain free rent. 44 Since straw-hut slums were often built on deserted spots, one reason why some landlords allowed land to go for low rents, or even asked no rent at all, was that once the land was densely populated, its value increased. "Usually the owners of such land," a report on housing of laborers argued, "do not care much for the amount of rentals, as they

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gain by the fact that the real estate they own would become more attractive and grow in value by being inhabited." 45 Another report on housing credited squatters with contributing to the real estate market in the city: "These coolies are in fact pioneers in expanding urban markets in Shanghai. In general, wherever they gather gradually flourishes and the value of real estate increases. Then, they are driven out of the area and to remoter places. The urban growth of Shanghai in recent years is the result of such changes." 4 6 The issues surrounding land use were, however, not always so smooth. More often than not, quarrels over ownership or rent rights broke out in the squatter areas, and some became violent. 47 The general deterioration of the rural economy in the late 1920s and the early 1930s and the Sino-Japanese War severely affected the hinterland of Shanghai, particularly northern Jiangsu and Anhui provinces. The war made the already bad situation in the countryside even worse. Thousands of refugees from rural areas around Shanghai flowed into the city. Those areas of Zhabei close to the railway station and covered with nothing but piles of rubble were convenient spots for squatters. In 1 9 3 5 , an

Evening

News reporter took a trip through the straw huts located a few blocks away from the railway station and wrote the following account: There you can discover shoulder high huts with any odds and ends such as broken pieces of wood, grass, reed or discarded iron sheets serving as tile for the roof; for windows there are little holes in the mud wall; rain or shine, summer or winter, the same darkness, dampness and dirty smells prevail. Some have a few pieces of broken-down furniture coated with slimy dust so that one cannot tell the material of which it is made, some even without what could be called a chair[,] for the occupants not only sit on the ground but sleep on it as well! On the little narrow paths there are always puddles of muddy water; here men, women, children, pigs, dogs, chickens and ducks move and live. It is difficult to pick one's way through the dirt.48 In fact, just as in Yaoshuilong, so too in Fangualong straw shacks were considered relatively good housing; the majority of dwellings in this slum were the so-called rolling earth dragons. But even the inhabitants of these hovels might have felt fortunate compared to those who lived in Zhaojiabang, another large slum in the southern suburbs of Shanghai. Zhaojiabang was originally a creek about 98 feet (30 meters) wide and 1 0 - 1 3 feet ( 3 - 4 meters) deep. Its upper reaches connected with the water system in the Xujiahui area in west suburban Shanghai and wound 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) eastward to flow into the Huangpu River. 49 In the

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nineteenth century it was a picturesque waterway where nearby villagers fished and netted crabs. Although it was a small creek and not well maintained, it actually carried water until 1 9 3 7 . The creek finally silted up after the Japanese occupied the city: the occupation force in Xujiahui constructed military roads, cutting off the creek's source. It gradually became the trash dump for factories and residences along its banks. Stagnant water in the creek joined by polluted water from nearby factories plus a daily in-pouring of garbage soon made Zhaojiabang a stinking sewer. A t the end of the Sino-Japanese War, the silted-up creek became home to thousands of migrants who swarmed into the city from the countryside because of the Civil War ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 9 ) . A f t e r 1945, the central stretch of the creek, about 2 miles long, quickly became crowded with poor people. During 1 9 4 6 - 4 8 , the numbers of households along Zhaojiabang rapidly increased from several dozen to 2,000, with a population of about 8,000, making Zhaojiabang one of the largest slums of Shanghai. 50 All kinds of crude dwellings found in the other slums of Shanghai sprang up in Zhaojiabang: the grounded boats, the rolling earth dragons, straw shacks, and mud huts. But the majority of the dwellings in this new slum were what was called shuishang gelou (lit., lofts on the water). A s the narrow waterfront became crowded with factories, straw shacks, and gundilong, the newcomers had to build right over the creek itself. This was done by driving a few bamboo or timber poles into the silted-up creek bed as posts on which a straw hut could be built, with one end resting on the bank and the other end on the posts. In this way space was "borrowed" from the creek. This was the worst type of dwelling imaginable: the dark, smelly water and mud of the dead creek were right under the floor, which was made up of merely a few broken boards with large cracks between them. It was a pestilential hellhole full of flies, mosquitoes, and other vermin. On rainy days the so-called lofts on the water became lofts in the water (shuizhong gelou).51 If Yaoshuilong, which was formed in the early 1920s, was representative of the first slums in Shanghai, then Zhaojiabang, formed in the late 1940s, was representative of the later slums in the city; and Fangualong, formed in the 1930s, can be considered an example of the slums that were somewhere in between. In comparing these three major slums in Shanghai, we see that the rude straw shack had become a "high-class" form of dwelling. B y 1949 most of Yaoshuilong's 4,ooo-odd dwellings were straw shacks; in Fangualong, straw shacks were considered good housing, for most of its 20,000 residents lived in rolling earth dragons; and in Zhaojiabang, not

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only were straw shacks rare, but 2,000 families did not even have enough ground on which to set up a rolling earth dragon. They had to build their houses on the dead creek bed. 52 The policy pursued by China's post-1949 authorities in slum clearance programs strengthens this classification or "grading" of these three major slums. Zhaojiabang, the poorest of the three, was given top priority in these programs. Construction work in Zhaojiabang was listed among the key projects under the First Five-Year Plan in Shanghai. The slum was demolished in 1954, and a beautiful avenue was built on the site in 1956. The major part of Fangualong was not completely renewed until 1964, when ten five-story apartments were built there. Indeed, these two slum removal projects became a favorite topic in the Party's political propaganda. Yaoshuilong, graded the "best," was not favored with any large-scale renewal program. The dwellings there were much improved after 1949, although some straw shacks remained as late as the 1970s. 5 3 In a word, during the period 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 5 0 , housing conditions in each new squatter community in Shanghai were worse than in the communities that preceded it. Late in the period, even Zhaojiabang did not look so bad compared to the "living arrangements" which sprang up here and there in the city. For instance, in 1948 a slum near Luban Road was said to contain "the city's most miserable dwellings": the so-called yaopeng (lit., kiln hut). These were less than 3 feet high and had a floor area of less than 1 8 square feet. In such a hovel one could scarcely sit upright; there was barely room enough to permit three people to sleep together. 54 But there was worse housing still: in the dock areas along the Huangpu River, one encountered straw lean-tos built against the walls of public toilets. These uninvited neighbors of public toilets sometimes simply slept inside the lavatories. For example, Liu Zhikang, a dock walloper, had slept in a public toilet for four years, from the age of twelve to sixteen. 55 Shantytown

Dwellers

It was estimated that in 1926 the city had more than 50,000 straw huts housing about 200,000 to 300,000 people. 56 A survey sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal Government in 1 9 3 6 found that in the city's Chinese district alone there were more than 20,000 households, with a population of 100,000, living in squatter settlements. According to a district-bydistrict survey conducted in 1948, the slums of Shanghai contained about 70,000 households, or more than 300,000 inhabitants, that is, about 1 0 percent of the city's total population. 57 These figures might be considered con-

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servative since the slums were scattered over much of the city, and as one can imagine, conditions in squatter communities were such that it was difficult to get an exact count of households. 58 A more systematic survey conducted in the early 1950s estimated that there were about 180,000 to 200,000 households living in 130,000 straw shacks of various types in Shanghai's shanty towns. 59 The total population of the slums was close to 1 million, or about one-fifth to one-sixth of the city's total population. 60 Who were these shantytown squatters? A depiction of the slum dwellers in contemporary Calcutta may be borrowed here to describe the shanty squatters in Republican Shanghai: "These people began their lives, without exception, in the villages. They came here lured by the city's gold, and this was the end of their rainbow. They have adopted a curious mixed, half-urban life-style. They illustrate a special history and a special social mobility." 6 1 The growth of Shanghai and the success stories it generated spread illusions about life in the city, and, even for those who were not driven by the desire to get ahead but merely to survive, Shanghai nevertheless seemed the logical place to go. A s a folk song sung in the rural area of Wuxi, Jiangsu, goes: Two swords weigh on the shoulderfs] of the peasant: High rent and interest. Three roads are open to him: First, escape; Second, prison; Third, to hang himself. Here, escape was the first choice for the peasant, and the reference to "escape" pointed right at Shanghai. 62 For many of the immigrants, a relative, neighbor, or friend who had earlier gone to the city and settled there was an inspiration, or at least permitted the hope or expectation that a friendly, or even helpful, reception awaited. They came to Shanghai, cherishing the hope of a fresh start; it must have been a rude shock to find that life in Shanghai was much harder than they had anticipated. To get a factory job was the usual goal for these former peasants. But once they arrived in Shanghai, they discovered that factory work was not easy to find. As noted earlier, to obtain even an entry-level factory job, one first needed strong recommendations, and, second, one had to give some gift to the factory foreman; in some cases, there were educational requirements or skill tests to be passed. 63 One can imagine the difficulty that poor newcomers had finding any kind of personal connection in this strange land. In addition, newcomers often found that their relatives, friends, and acquaintances ac-

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Fig. 1 0 . On a winter afternoon curious shantytown dwellers, mostly children and young adults, crowd around to see foreign visitors, an apparently unusual adventure in this squatter's area. Note that a number of children are eating from bowls. On a warm day, the lane would be livened up by residents who liked to have their supper in the public space outside their hovels. Courtesy of Shanghai Municipal Archive.

tually could not help much, since they themselves were usually desperately poor. As a Chinese saying put it, " A mud Buddha can hardly protect himself when he crosses a river" (ni Pusa guojiang,

zishen nanbao).64

Thus,

countless newcomers without skills in demand in modern factories, without personal connections, and without money drifted to squatter areas (Fig. 10). One author who visited several slums along the banks of Suzhou Creek near Caojiadu (the Cao family ferry) and Fanhuangdu (the Buddha ferry) was saddened by the conditions there and asked the dwellers a question, knowing that his question might seem naive or offensive to them: " W h y don't you stay in your home village and farm rather than come here and suffer?" One of the residents, an old man in his sixties who looked experienced and knowledgeable about life, answered, as if he were lecturing someone on a belabored topic: "Farm? Nowadays you can't make a living from farming!" He then spoke of the disaster-ridden life in the countryside—most residents had come from the villages of Yancheng and Gaoyou

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and nearby counties in Subei—and concluded that for them coming to Shanghai was virtually a case of "fleeing for one's life." The visitor observed that almost all the residents' belongings were things they had brought from their home villages, yet other than a kerosene oven and some cooking utensils, he could see virtually nothing in the shacks. "Haven't you brought anything else from your old home?" he asked. "Yes, we have," a dweller answered with a w r y smile: " W e have all brought a mouth to be f e d ! " 6 5 The story of Zhang Kouzi, a fifty-year resident of Yaoshuilong, illustrates how difficult it was for those who came to Shanghai from a poor rural area to get a steady job to "feed the mouth." Very often the only migrants who could get factory jobs were children. Zhang was a son in a poor peasant family in Subei. In about 1924 a natural disaster led the family to lose their only property—their house—and they became homeless. Zhang's parents managed to obtain a small boat, on which the whole family came to Shanghai along the Grand Canal. They anchored the boat on the bank of Suzhou Creek near Yaoshuilong, where the family (Kouzi, his parents, one younger brother and one younger sister) commenced to live. Seeking a factory job, the Zhangs sought help from a relative who had come to Shanghai several years earlier and who was working in a Japanese cotton mill. Being a poor worker himself, the relative was unable to help them to get into the mill. In any case, the mill did not need adult male labor, so Kouzi's father became a rickshaw puller. Kouzi's mother, who then was in her thirties, was considered too old to be a mill worker. After the family sent a gift to the foreman, Kouzi alone, who at that time was thirteen, was hired as a laborer in the mill. 66 However, the combined income of a rickshaw puller and a child laborer was not sufficient to support the whole family. Therefore, the mother sent the two younger children to roam the streets scavenging trash to sell. Needless to say, the family lived in dire poverty. A f t e r many years the Zhang family moved from the boat, which was now too decrepit to live in, to a gundilong. Kouzi's younger brother and sister did not survive the hardship, both dying in childhood. 67 The experience of the Zhang family was in many ways typical for the shantytown squatters in Shanghai. For example, in 1926, a petition to the local authorities presented by thousands of slum residents in east Shanghai (Hudong) said that all the petitioners were from villages in northern Jiangsu province. A n investigation of Beipingmincun, a straw-shack slum in the southwest of the city, indicated that 60 percent of the residents there had migrated to Shanghai directly from rural areas. 68 In terms of origin, immigrants from Subei (or Jiangbei, mainly those

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areas of Jiangsu province north of the Yangzi River) formed what we might call the stereotypical body of slum residents in Shanghai. As Honig observes, " S o close was the association of Subei people with the slums that they were often referred to as 'Jiangbei shack settlements,'" and these areas "became a central arena in which the category Subei people was constructed and imbued with symbolic meanings." 6 9 If there was an "official" language in the slums, it was not the Shanghai dialect but the Subei dialect, which until the 1980s was still commonly spoken in the area where the former slums were located. 70 A n investigation conducted in 1 9 3 6 estimated that of Shanghai's nearly 100,000 shantytown residents, 70 percent were Subei natives; Hubei natives and Shanghai locals made up 1 0 percent of the population each; Shandong natives accounted for 5 percent; and another 5 percent were people of other native origins. 71 Although a lack of detailed statistics makes it impossible to tell the precise numbers of Subei people in Shanghai's shack settlements over the years, it is unquestionable that residents of Subei origins constituted the majority of the population. 72 The occupations of the Zhangs were also rather typical for slum residents. Adult males usually found work where muscle was the only qualification, hence the large numbers of rickshaw pullers, coolies, and dockworkers who inhabited the shantytowns. Adult females, if not fortunate enough to find a job in a factory, often became street peddlers, carrying a bamboo basket with small items such as sesame cakes and fried dough sticks, the most common breakfast food of Shanghai's urbanites; or green onions and ginger roots, the favorite spices in Chinese kitchens; or some other tiny, cheap items. Some, like Kouzi's mother, were too poor to buy anything to resell, and thus they could only roam the streets picking up trash to sell. Part of the trash they picked up, such as discarded vegetables, became food for their families. Quite a number of slum residents had simply no livelihood but begging. A 1 9 3 9 investigation reported that all of Yaoshuilong's residents were rickshaw pullers, coolies, small peddlers, or mill workers. 73 The last were a large occupational group, perhaps in part because this slum was adjacent to the major cotton mill district of the city. The occupational composition of the residents of Yaoshuilong was confirmed in a survey made in the early 1950s at the same location. The survey revealed that 40 percent of the residents were factory workers, while the remaining 60 percent were rickshaw pullers, pedicab drivers, or peddlers. 74 In fact, because of its close proximity to the Huxi industrial district, Yaoshuilong had the largest proportion of factory-worker residents among the three major slums discussed; hence it was often called an "industrial slum." If factory workers were only a mi-

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nor component of the Yaoshuilong population, then, it is safe to say that factory workers were far from being the major inhabitants of the city's shanty towns.

Factory Employment:

A Shantytown

Dream

Modern industrial workers have been commonly viewed as the lower class or, to use a Marxist expression, the most exploited class. But in Shanghai, any adult who could find and keep a stable factory job was definitely not on the lowest rung of the social ladder. There were two notable surveys on the living standards of Shanghai industrial workers made during the Nanjing decade ( 1 9 2 7 - 3 7 ) . One was jointly conducted by the Shanghai Bureau of Price Investigation (Shanghai diaochahuojiaju)

and the Peking Institute of Social Investigation (Bei-

ping shehui diaochasuo) in 1 9 2 7 - 2 8 , with Tao Menghe as the program director. 75 The other was conducted by the Bureau of Social Affairs of the City Government of Greater Shanghai (Shanghai shizhengfu

shehuiju)

in

1 9 2 9 - 3 0 , with Cai Zhenya as the program director. 76 Tao's survey investigated the families of 230 cotton mill workers in Caojiadu, Huxi. Cai's survey was more diverse. It surveyed 305 working families of various occupations and districts in Shanghai, including the foreign settlements and the Chinese districts. A s far as housing patterns were concerned, the results of these two surveys showed that most industrial working families in Shanghai did not live in straw shacks. In Tao's survey, 95.7 percent (220 households) resided in two-story alleyway houses, and 4.3 percent (10 households) resided in bungalow-type, single-story row houses; no family in the survey resided in a straw shack. 77 As noted, all the households in this survey were headed by a cotton mill worker. Such workers were among the lowest paid of Shanghai industrial operatives. 78 Therefore, if, as this survey showed, cotton mill workers were not residents of straw shacks, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of Shanghai industrial workers were not residents of the straw-shack slums. Cai's survey reinforces this conclusion. In his study, which covered not only industrial workers but also some other occupations such as transportation worker, service worker, and so on, 61 percent (185 households) resided in two-story row houses, 34 percent (103 households) in one-story row houses, and only 5 percent (17 households) in straw shacks. 79 Since Cai's survey was more diverse than Tao's, both in area as well as in occupations covered, it must be considered the more representative of the two.

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Even though Cai provided no detailed information on the occupations of the 5 percent who lived in straw shacks and we do not know if they were factory workers, the results of his survey reinforce the conclusion that most industrial workers did not live in straw-shack slums. H. D. Lamson, a professor at the University of Shanghai and one of the few contemporary sociologists to have paid attention to the slums of the city, conducted a detailed study of 23 households in Yangshupu in 1 9 3 2 . Lamson reported, "Where occupations were stated, the men were employed as follows:—farmers (8), wheelbarrow coolie (5), coolie (3), road building work (2), and factory work (1). This suggests that these straw hut occupants are not predominantly mill operatives. A s to the occupation of the women, there are nine classed as farmers, two as factory workers; two do washing, one is a street peddler. The children either do nothing, peddle small things in the streets, or pick up things from rubbish dumps." 8 0 Two things are especially notable about Lamson's report. First, although Yangshupu was the largest industrial district of Shanghai, factory work was nevertheless the least prevalent occupation among the slum dwellers Lamson studied. Of course, slums that were not so close to factories were likely to have an even lower proportion of factory workers. Second, those who stated their occupation to be " f a r m e r " were actually unemployed or virtually unemployed. Yangshupu in the 1930s was already a well-established industrial area where little land was available for farming. A s early as the beginning of this century, rural life started to disappear in this area, and many villagers, in part as a result of the lack of available land, gave up farming in favor of some type of urban employment. 81 A s Lamson wrote, "Most of the people living in these miserable huts are 'kiang-pei' [Jiangbei] or 'kompo' [Jiangbei in the Shanghai dialect] people from north of the Yangtze River. Having no friends or relatives, and being without means, these laborers have drifted to the big city to seek opportunities for employment." The "farmers" of Lamson's study were most likely former peasants but currently jobless in the city. A large portion of shanty squatters were unemployed. A n investigation conducted by the Bureau of Social Affairs of the Municipal Government of Greater Shanghai in 1928 of ten different labor and trade unions found that of 155,069 union members, 10,009 (6.45 percent) were unemployed. 82 In Cai's survey of Shanghai working families in 1 9 2 9 - 3 0 , the unemployment rate was 8.74 percent. 83 Unemployment in the shantytowns must have been much higher than the city's average unemployment rate. During the Civil War period ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 9 ) , for example, Shanghai's unemployment rate was about 5 percent, while in Yaoshuilong it was 1 7 . 5 percent. 84 Another

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survey, of Fangualong, discovered something rather amazing: in 1949, 45 percent of the total households in this slum were without a single employed family member, and 5 1 . 5 percent had only one family member employed. 85 This survey of 202 households in Fangualong found that among 404 "adults" between the ages of 1 6 and 4 5 , 1 4 2 (35 percent) were unemployed. Of those who had a job, 186 (46 percent) were rickshaw pullers, pedicab drivers, or street peddlers; only 76 (19 percent) were factory workers. 86 Another survey, conducted in the early 1950s in Yaoshuilong, found that factory workers made up 39.2 percent of the adult population (above 1 5 years of age). 87 A third survey, conducted at the same time, of a sample of 547 households in Yaoshuilong, including 1 , 2 2 3 adults, revealed that 53.7 percent of the adults were employed; among those who were employed, factory workers constituted 3 7 . 1 percent; rickshaw pullers and pedicab drivers, 24.4 percent; peddlers, 20.3 percent; and others, 18.2 percent. 88 Given the fact that this slum was located right in the Huxi industrial district, where cotton mills and many other factories were concentrated, the percentage of factory workers among the employed adults can only be considered fairly small; if we add in the unemployed, the percentage of factory workers among all adults was even smaller. One author explained that the rural refugees who came to Shanghai cherishing the hope of finding a factory job were thrown into the gigantic army of urban unemployment before they even had a chance to step into the gate of a mill, so the slums were the only place they could hang on in the city. 89 The problem goes beyond that. Even if one did get a factory job, in most cases life still remained uncertain because most jobs available in factories were of a casual and part-time nature, with little job security. Throughout the Republican period, employers in Shanghai preferred hiring temporary, casual workers. The resulting fluidity of the labor market had two important implications. On one hand, hiring casuals suggests that job openings were frequent and plentiful, and this in turn means that there were opportunities for newcomers. A peasant who came to the city without any training may have realistically hoped to find a temporary, unskilled or semiskilled job in a mill that changed its labor force frequently. On the other hand, the practice of hiring casuals indicates the difficulty of maintaining a stable job in the city. And, for an immigrant from the countryside, not having stable employment in the city meant one was unsettled— living in a straw hut was just the most visible symbol of the tenuous existence of rural immigrants. According to official statistics, in 1928 the textile industry employed

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76.5 percent of all industrial workers in the city, and textiles remained the most important industry of the city through the Republican period.90 A notable feature of the textile industry was the fact that women and children formed the majority of its workers. Throughout the 1920s, the number of male laborers in the textile industry decreased dramatically. Largely because of the availability of female workers, textile mills laid off male workers at a startling rate in the late twenties. For example, in 1928 about 40 percent of the 4,ooo-odd employees of the Shenxin Number Seven Cotton Mill, one of Shanghai's early textile factories, were male; only a year later, in May of 1929, the percentage had dropped to 1 percent.91 At the same time, indentured female workers became the industry's main source of labor.92 Many women workers started their careers in textile mills as children. By 1930, 66.5 percent of Shanghai's textile workers were women, and 9 percent were children; male workers made up less than a quarter of the workers.93 The Rong family, which owned a number of conglomerates in the textile and flour trades and was regarded as the Rockefellers of China, set a hiring policy in 1931 that "anywhere women can do the job, they shall be hired." In 1 9 3 3 - 3 5 , 93 percent of the new hires in the textile mills owned by the Rongs were female.94 But this does not mean these workers obtained stable jobs. Quite the opposite; a major reason for hiring female workers was the fact that they were supposedly easier to manage and easier to lay off than male workers. When business was slow, many woman workers lost their jobs. In the Yong'an Cotton Mills, one of the largest conglomerates of its kind, from 1932 to 1935 about 42 percent of the workers (mostly women) lost their jobs. 95 A few more examples underscore this point. In the Zhanghua Woolen Textile Company (owned by the industrial magnate Liu Hongsheng), longterm workers were issued red identification cards while casuals were given blue ones. Switching from a blue card to a red one required passing a technical proficiency test; success in the test was considered a big step up.96 In the Hengfeng Printing and Dyeing Mill, worker status was divided into three types: long-term, casual, and probationary. There were very few long-term workers; most employees were casuals and probationary workers. After the Sino-Japanese War, casuals in the mill were called by different names, such as term workers (dingqi gong), preferential workers (zhaogu gong), and probationary workers (shiyong gong). Most casuals were recruited when business was good and laid off when it was slow. Casuals might work for just a week, and no longer than three months. Sometimes they might work only half a day: in the afternoon when fewer workers were needed, they were immediately sent home.97

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Unlike in the textile industry, workers in the mechanized flour milling industry, which ranked next to textiles in economic importance in Republican China, were all males. 98 But this does not mean workers were secure there. Production in flour mills was largely seasonal, fluctuating with the availability of wheat. Consequently, employment was also seasonal. Every year around the time of the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival (Duanyang, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, which usually falls in June)— which coincides with the wheat harvest—when production in flour mills went full tilt, many workers were recruited. But around the Double Ninth Festival (Chongyang, the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, which usually falls in October), when the wheat was used up, these workers were terminated. Thus, flour mill workers were nicknamed "two-yang

workers"

(liangyang gongren; the two " y a n g s " being the Duanyang and the Chongyang). In the flour industry many porters were hired to work outside of the workshops carrying heavy bags of wheat and flour. These porters too were all two-yang workers." Qiao Zongyuan, a senior worker in Fuxin Number One Flour Mill, recalled that every year around the Duanyang festival many workers, most of them casuals, were recruited into Fuxin. Those who had been terminated the previous autumn might be called back at that time. But in September and October, when the off-season arrived, at least half of the workers were laid off. Usually, skilled workers were kept to maintain the equipment. For laid-off workers who had land in their home village, going back to the village was the best option; otherwise, they had to roam the streets and face hunger, like all who had no land to farm in the countryside. Ming Changmei, a casual worker in Fuxin Number Two and Number Eight Flour Mills, said that in off-seasons he went from place to place in search of a job. He worked as a porter in factories in Nichengqiao near the Nanking Road area and in the Yangshupu industrial area, and also as a coolie on the docks along Yangjiadu (lit., the Yang family ferry) in Pudong. 100 In a city where the rent for a 107-square-foot (10-square-meter) room in a working-class neighborhood could easily exceed half of a worker's income, casual workers and the unemployed almost inevitably turned to shantytowns to find a home. Casual workers in cotton mills were typical of factory workers who lived in shanty areas. According to a 1936 report on nearly 100,000 straw-hut dwellers in the city, dockworkers, night soil collectors, and coolies each made up 1 5 percent of the shantytown population; 5 percent were rickshaw pullers. The other half of the population consisted of the unemployed (30 percent, which included beggars) and casual cotton mill workers (20 percent). Most of the mill workers were women

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and children, and most of those, at the time of investigation, worked only one shift in three or four days. In fact the line between these casual workers and the unemployed was difficult to draw. With an extremely uncertain job, and hence uncertain income, these people understandably gravitated to Shanghai's shantytowns. 1 0 1 Since the poor desperately sought any means of livelihood, one would expect to find them drawn to those places that offered even minimal means of eking out a living. Thus, a slum's location often gives a clue to the occupations of its residents. For instance, many porters lived in the slums close to the Shanghai Railway Station in Zhabei, where daily thousands of passengers came and went. Also, most dockworkers lived in the slums along the Huangpu River, while few lived in the western part of the city where scarcely any major docks were located. Factory workers were most likely to be found in the slums of the Huxi and Hudong industrial districts. In the shantytowns in the southern district of the old county town, one could find another occupational group: handicraftspeople. Their concentration there might have been a heritage of the traditional handicraft workshops that had been located in the nearby county seat. 102 B y the same token, rickshaw pullers (and in the late 1940s, pedicab drivers) could be found in every slum of Shanghai. The nature of their w o r k — they operated everywhere in the city—made the location of their residence relatively immaterial. 103 In September 1950, the municipal government conducted a citywide survey of slums, classified by the occupation of the household head, and found that rickshaw pullers were the single largest occupational group in all slums: 3 7 percent of Shanghai's shanty town families were headed by rickshaw pullers, compared to 1 7 percent by street peddlers (the second-largest group) and 1 6 percent by other unskilled laborers (the third). 104 Likewise, beggars were another ubiquitous group in shantytowns. Shanghai in the early 1930s had about 20,000 professional beggars, all of whom lived in shack settlements or straw huts scattered in back alleys. 105 The public so closely associated these slums with beggars that all the shack settlements in the city were simply referred to as "beggar villages" or "beggar huts"; and the capped boats on Suzhou Creek that housed the poor were labeled "beggar boats," regardless of who really lived there. 106 On the walls at the entrance of a typical alley in shanty areas one could always see signs in big characters handwritten in limewash or white chalk. These were usually wishful blessings for life, such as "All Is Well" (renkou ping'an)

or "Four Seasons in Peace" (siji taiping). Some signs, however,

served a more practical purpose, such as "Public Toilet Inside This Lane" or

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"For Defecation, Please Walk In." In time, these signs became a symbol of Shanghai's slums. 1 0 7 In some way they expressed a more human touch than some printed signs often found in the city's other neighborhoods, such as those reading " N o Posting!" or " A n y Poster Will Be Torn Down at O n c e ! " 1 0 8 But the blessings for life revealed precisely the fragility and uncertainty of life inside these lanes. Ironically perhaps, the ultimate goal of the dwellers there was to escape the neighborhoods that were protected by nothing more than a few wishful limewashed signs. Most workers in higher-paid industries and trades lived in the city's average residential dwellings, that is, alleyway houses. On average a working-class family in pre-1937 Shanghai spent 6 - 9 percent of its income on housing. 109 For a household with a monthly income of around $30.00—about average for the family of an unskilled laborer in the 1 9 3 0 s — a monthly rent higher than $3.00 would have been more than it could afford. According to an S M C report, the monthly rent for rooms in squatters' huts in the Settlement in the mid-i930S varied from $0.40 to $3.00. This was, of course, the lowest rental that one could find in the city, and it suggests that a family with a monthly income of around $30.00 could hardly escape the fate of living in shantytown. 1 1 0 In the same time period, the rent for a simple row house (a single-bay alleyway house; see chapter 4) in an average neighborhood varied from $10.00 to $30.00. While this rent would be unthinkable for an unskilled laborer, it was manageable for a postal worker, a transportation worker, a skilled machinist, and the like. For instance, the monthly rent for a house in Jiahe Li, an alleyway-house compound located just across the street from the British-owned tram company on Hart Road, ranged from $8.00 (without a courtyard) to $ 1 2 . 0 0 (with a courtyard) in the late 1920s. M a n y similar alleyway houses around this area in west Shanghai—many were owned by the real estate magnate Silas Aaron Hardoon ( 1 8 4 7 - 1 9 3 1 ) — were rented by employees of the tram company. 1 1 1 These workers, and workers elsewhere in the city, might not have been able to rent a whole house but had to be content with one or two rooms for the entire family, a situation that was common among Shanghailanders, and not only working-class families. Alleyway-house compounds therefore housed people from all walks of life except those who were extremely poor or dazzlingly rich. Thus it is to alleyway-house neighborhoods— where working-class types rubbed shoulders with teachers, artists, writers, shop clerks, office workers, small business owners, prostitutes, and priests—that one must turn to witness how most people of Shanghai lived.

CHAPTER 4

The Homes of the Little Urbanités

The lilong, or alleyway houses, in spite of being e v e r y w h e r e in the city, might have easily been overlooked. This is not only because they were usually located in back alleys behind commercial enterprises but also because, paradoxically, their v e r y commonness made them blend into a backdrop against which other urban structures stood out. Visitors were often struck by Shanghai's modern skyline along the Bund and Nanking Road, or impressed b y its European-style villas in the city's western suburbs; more social-minded observers were perhaps stunned b y the abject poverty of the city's squatter shacks, described in chapter 3. But few people (including scholars) paid attention to the lilong. A s for local residents, lilong were merely the place most people called home and were nothing special. The lack of attention to this common architecture was simply a matter of, as a Chinese proverb describes, "turning a blind eye to a familiar sight" (shu shi wu du).1 But this neglect must be corrected. N o social or cultural history of Shanghai would be complete without an examination of this particular architecture and the neighborhoods it fostered. A n d , given the importance of Shanghai in twentieth-century China, it is no exaggeration to say that the same statement applies to modern Chinese urban history. This chapter provides details on the lilong houses (in particular, the shikumen) and their social implications, which involve primarily the housing market that operated at the rental and subletting levels and its impact on the life of ordinary people. T h e lilong neighborhoods, where commercial enterprises and residential premises mixed, played an decisive role in creating modern Shanghai's commercial culture. 138

The Homes of the Little Urbanités

The Rise of the Modern Real Estate

/

139

Market

Shanghai's modern real estate market originated in two wars that occurred near the city's foreign settlements in the mid-nineteenth century: the Small Swords Uprising and the Taiping Rebellion. As noted in chapter 1 , from September 1 8 5 3 to February 1 8 5 5 the walled county seat of Shanghai, whose northern gates were located only a block south of the French Concession, was occupied by a rebellious band known as the Small Swords, or the Triads. Their fight to seize the county seat brought the first tide of refugees into the foreign settlements, which, in spite of the ambiguities of their legal status, had been until then reserved for Westerners only. B y early 1854, more than 20,000 refugees from the county seat had entered the foreign areas. Later, the number of refugees reached 80,000. 2 A s we have seen, in the face of this crisis, Shanghai's foreign community debated whether to expel the Chinese and maintain segregation or to build housing for the refugees (to be rented to them for, it was hoped, a profit). Eventually, the idea of continuing segregation was overridden by the undisguised wish to make money by renting land and buildings to the Chinese. But whatever the result of the debate, the dismantling of segregation was soon to prove inevitable: the Taiping Rebellion ( 1 8 5 0 - 1 8 6 4 ) — t h e capital of the Taipings was Nanjing, two hundred miles northwest of Shanghai—drove thousands of Chinese in the Jiangnan region to flee to Shanghai and seek safety under European rule. In particular, in 1 8 6 0 - 6 2 , when Taiping troops marched toward Shanghai several times, it was reported that refugees in Shanghai's foreign settlements reached half a million. 3 Given the geographical size of the foreign settlements at that time, this might be an exaggerated estimation. More reliable sources reported that by 1 8 6 5 the population of the British and American Settlements (later known as the International Settlement) had increased to 92,884. Most of the population were Chinese from the vicinity of Shanghai. At the same time, about 50,000 Chinese had moved into the French Concession. B y the end of the Taiping Rebellion, well over 1 1 0 , 0 0 0 Chinese had moved into Shanghai's foreign settlements. 4 In spite of the unhappiness of both the British consul and the Chinese Daotai over the problem of crime and the threat to public health caused by the refugees, the business of building and renting houses to the Chinese boomed. 5 From September 1 8 5 3 to July 1854, more than 800 two-story row houses were built on Guangdong Road and Fuzhou Road in the British Settlement; still more houses were scattered in the northwest part of

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A Place to Stick an Awl

the Settlement, as well as on the Bund and along the Yangjingbang Creek, which separated the British Settlement from the French Concession. B y i860, there were 8,740 houses in the British Settlement, mostly owned by Britishers and Americans but inhabited by Chinese. Clusters of houses continued to be built on Hankou Road, Jiujiang Road, and further north to Nanking Road and up to the south bank of Suzhou Creek. 6 These new clusters did not merely change the landscape of Shanghai, but, more significant, they marked the beginning in China of a modern real estate market. In traditional China, residences were usually built as individual, free-standing structures. A row of houses was usually formed without plan by a gradual accumulation of structures built at different times and in different styles. 7 In that sense, the houses built in Shanghai's British Settlement in the 1850s and 1860s were new to the Chinese, for these houses were built in batches of identical units and were, as a modern developer would say, built on speculation (that is, built for the market). The difference in design, arguably, was derived from the difference in purpose: traditional Chinese houses were constructed individually because they were mostly built by or for owners for their personal use, while the row houses in the foreign settlements were constructed solely for commercial purposes. In Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century, both the design and purpose of these houses were European innovations. Of course, land and housing had been commodities in China long before the coming of the West. A t least from the eleventh century on, house purchasing and leasing were already common in Chinese cities. 8 But these commercial activities were usually conducted on a small scale. House purchasing and leasing were primarily a matter of what might be called self-consumption (e.g., building a home for oneself), of convenience (e.g., renting a house for a sojourn away from home, or selling a house when one relocated), or of a shift of wealth (e.g., selling a house to pay debts, or purchasing a house in order to have hengchan, or permanent property). To build identical houses on a large scale solely for the market, as Western merchants started to do in Shanghai in the middle 1850s, was something that the nation had never before seen. 9 In that sense, it could be argued that China's first modern real estate market was born in the gun smoke in Shanghai, or more specifically, on the blocks of Nanking Road. In the climate of continuing Western encroachment in the late nineteenth century, the modern real estate market was destined to have a profound impact on the life of the Chinese residents of the city. The end of the Taiping Rebellion brought a temporary decrease in the population of the city in the late 1860s, but the real estate market remained

The Homes of the Little Urbanités

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141

steady. According to a British merchant, by renting land or a house to the Chinese, foreigners in Shanghai could make a profit of at least 30 to 40 percent. 10 A contemporary commented in the early 1870s that renting out houses was the "most profitable business" in Shanghai, a business that until then had remained predominately foreign-run. 1 1 B y the 1870s the wartime speculation had died away and a more regulated real estate market began to emerge in Shanghai. A s we have seen, in September 1869 the Land Regulations, regarded as the constitution of Shanghai's foreign settlements, was revised and approved by the European envoys in Beijing to create the Shanghai Municipal Council to govern the International Settlement, the core of modern Shanghai. One of its first orders of business was to levy a tax on real property. The rate was set at 3 percent of estimated land value in 1 8 7 4 and gradually increased to 7 percent by 1 9 1 9 . In 1869 taxes levied on houses were set at 8 percent of the rent for Chinese-style houses and 6 percent for Western-style houses. B y 1 9 1 9 , taxes for both Chinese and Western houses were levied at a rate of 1 4 percent. Furthermore, mainly for purposes of taxation, the International Settlement was divided into four districts: the Central, the North, the East, and the West, and periodically all real property was reassessed. 12 A brochure indexing land value and tax was issued by the S M C , in which landlords could easily find the standard taxes for their property. In the period 1 8 6 9 - 1 9 3 3 , at least nineteen assessments of property value were conducted by the S M C ; in other words, on average there was a reassessment every three to four years. 1 3 Initiated by Westerners, Shanghai's real estate market was also dominated by them. All real estate magnates in late-nineteenth-century Shanghai were Westerners. Among them we find the names of such well-known China adventurers as Edwin Smith, Thomas Hanbury ( 1 8 3 2 - 1 9 0 7 ) , Henry Lester ( 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 2 5 ) , the Hogg brothers (William, James, and E. Jenner), the Sassoon family, and Silas Aaron Hardoon ( 1 8 4 7 - 1 9 3 1 ) . From 1869 to 1 9 3 3 , the top three real estate magnates—whose holdings fluctuated to include from 36 percent to more than 60 percent of the real estate along Nanking Road—were all foreigners. In the early 1930s, close to half the real estate along Nanking Road, the most expensive area in the city, was under Hardoon's name. 1 4 However, shortly after foreigners launched the real estate market in Shanghai, Chinese merchants started to join the adventure. Among the refugees who came to Shanghai during the Taiping Rebellion were many wealthy landlords and bureaucrats. Some of them soon found that speculation in urban real estate was a much more profitable business than renting

142

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A Place to Stick an Awl

out farmland in the countryside. Among the Chinese real estate owners were four families—surnamed Zhang, Liu, Xin, and Peng—known as the "Four Elephants," who owned many shikumen compounds in the Nanking Road area. These four families had a few things in common. They all hailed from Nanxun, Zhejiang province, and all owned a great amount of land and controlled the silk and tea markets there. Having come to Shanghai, they continued their silk and tea businesses but shifted the bulk of their capital to real estate. 15 B y the end of the 1940s, Shanghai had more than 3,000 Chinese who were qualified to be called great real estate investors (fangdichan dayezhu), an epithet commonly applied to anyone who owned more than 10,760 square feet (1,000 square meters) of real property in the city. About 1 6 0 of this group owned more than 100,000 square feet (10,000 square meters) of real property; 30 owned more than 300,000 square feet (30,000 square meters). 16 M a n y Chinese real estate investors were compradors. 17 Both Chinese and foreigners invested in not only commercial property but also residential houses in the Nanking Road area. 18 From 1 9 1 0 to 1940, most old houses along Nanking Road left from the previous century were remodeled into alleyway (lilong) houses. 19 This type of dwelling was derived from the two-story houses built in clusters during the Taiping period but rebuilt with a new and more sophisticated design in the early 1870s (discussed below). First built in the Nanking Road area, alleyway houses soon appeared in other parts of the city and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, they had become the predominant type of housing in Shanghai. B y the end of the 1940s, seven decades after the emergence of alleyway houses, more than 72 percent of the city's dwellings were alleyway houses, and about three-quarters of these were shikumen houses. 20 To the present day, more than a century since the first shikumen was built, alleyway houses remain the predominant type of housing in the city. 21 Shanghai's real estate market, therefore, was launched with the construction of alleyway houses, and much of the market remained connected with the evolution of these houses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What was important to the everyday life of the people of Shanghai was of course not the operation of the market at the level of the real estate magnate (whether foreign or Chinese), but its operation at the grassroots level. Let us now look into how the alleyway houses and the housing market changed to meet the needs of ordinary people, and, in turn, how the daily life of the ordinary people of Shanghai was profoundly shaped by changes in the housing market.

The Homes of the Little Urbanités

The Evolution of Alleyway

/

143

Houses

The row houses built during the refugee tide of the 1850s and 1860s were constructed in a rush and, since all were made of wood, by the 1870s many of them had become dilapidated. In addition, wooden houses built in rows were particularly unsafe in case of fire. Thus, newly built houses in the early 1870s were constructed of brick, wood, and cement. These houses were still built in rows, and a few rows were marked off by surrounding walls to form a residential compound. Paved alleyways between the rows were built within the walled compound, a necessity for access, light, and ventilation. Hence the name for this type of dwelling: lilongfangzi

or long-

tang fangzi, meaning alleyway house. Later, alleyway houses evolved into a number of different styles, but the term "lilong," or "longtang," continued to be used to describe all types of alleyway houses in the city. 22 N A M I N G THE A L L E Y W A Y

HOUSES

The earliest as well as the most common type of alleyway house was known as shikumen, a name descriptive of the main entrance of the house. The origin of the term is obscure and needs some explanation. Although virtually everybody in twentieth-century Shanghai knew the word "shikumen," few could explain its meaning and origin. Literally, it means "a stone warehouse door," an interpretation that does not help us understand the character of the house itself. The main entrance of shikumen houses was a wooden door of two planks painted black, with two bronze knockers, one in the middle of each plank. The door was placed within a stone framework; hence the term "shikumen" can mean "a wooden door within a stone frame" (Fig. 1 1 ) . 2 3 In her recent research on Shanghai's alleyway houses, Luo Suwen gives a historical and literary interpretation of the term. Luo found that it was associated with the names for entrances of palaces in ancient China. In ancient China, the standard design of the entrance to an emperor's or king's palace consisted of five layers of gates, and the design of the entrance to a prince's or duke's palace, three layers of gates. Each of the gates bore a special and literary name, but the outermost gate for both emperor-kings' and prince-dukes' palaces shared the same name: kumen. Thus the name of Shanghai's alleyway houses means a "stone

kumen."24

Given the fact that the main entrance or the front door of the house was stone-framed, this interpretation is illuminating. This line of thinking, however, suggests that the outermost door (i.e., the kumen) referred not to the front door of individual houses inside the compound but instead to the

144

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A Place to Stick an Awl

* ?




^O {YS ir"S § S sx ~ VJ S tu

Area

Zhabei Nanshi Downtown Huxi (West Shanghai) Total

2

«

13 o o -c o -a

fc c O U U

s £ 2; £

S

-R 00 w

VI

98

(91.6)

27 88

(34-2) (90-7)

150

142

433

355

(94-7) (82.0)

107 79 97

* I H gR -A« < a

5

4 46

(3-7) (58.2)

4

(4-1)

5 59

(3-3) (13.6)

•

5 6

(4-7) (7-6) (5-2)

3 19

(2.0) (4-4)

The "District Commercial Center" for each area is as follows: Beizhan (or Northern Station) for Zhabei, Laoximen (or Old West Gate) for Nanshi, Rue du Consulat (today's Jinlingdong Road) for Downtown, and Jing'ansi (or Temple of Peace) for Huxi. See chapter 6 for details on the city's district commercial centers. NOTE:

1 5 . T H E PERSISTENCE OF N A T I V E A C C E N T S

vt

00 m ^ S1 60 t-

-R R a -R

A

1 9-43

B

18.92 18.31 15.38

C D

51.09 51.40 51.91 61.33

? R

c

O-,

g

U K » O R

R "T3 O R '•E O

aK a. W TU TU ?

25% 75%

"Accent level A = speaks the local dialect of one's native place, B = speaks the Shanghai dialect with a heavy accent, C = speaks the Shanghai dialect with an accent, D = speaks the Shanghai dialect without an accent.

APPENDIX 2

List of Informants

No." 1-1

Sex

Year Born

Native Place

Born in SH

m

1929

Qidong (J)

n

Moved to SH 1946

Occupationb

Interview Location and Date Shanghai

mill worker

3-16-89 1-2

m

1930

Shanghai

—

ferry boat attendant

Shanghai 3-16-89

1-3

f

1934

Taicang (J)

n

1939

Shanghai

mill worker

3-18-89 1-4

f

1922

Songjiang (J)

n

1938

Shanghai

vendor

3-18-89 1-5

f

1941

Qingjiang (J)

y

—

Shanghai

elementary schoolteacher

1-6

m

1919

Siyang (J)

n

1937

rickshaw puller

3-19-89 Shanghai 3-19-89 7-14-93

1-7

m

1923

Xuzhou (J)

n

1932

railway porter

Shanghai 3-19-89

1-8

m

1915

Gaoyou (])

n

1930

rickshaw puller

Shanghai 3-19-89

1-9

m

1915

Yangzhou (J)

n

1938

store owner

Shanghai 3-20-89

1-10

f

1920

Yuyao (Z)

n

1929

store owner

Shanghai 3-20-89 3-26-89 Continued on next page

329

330

/

No."

Sex

Year Born

1-11

£

1918

Appendix

2

Native Place Shaoshan (Z)

Born in SH

Moved to SH

n

1935

Occupation1' housewife

Interview Location and Date Shanghai 3-20-89 3-25-89

1-12

m

1926

Shaoxing (J)

n

1938

store owner

Shanghai 3-20-89

1-13

f

1922

Nanhui (J)

y

—

store co-owner

1-14

m

1949

Ningbo (Z)

y

—

shop assistant

Shanghai 3-22-89 Shanghai 3-20-89 3-23-89

1-15

m

1920

Jiangdu (J)

n

1934

store owner

Shanghai 3-23-89 3-27-89 8-17-93 8-21-93

1-16

f

1918

Huanggang (H)

n

1942

store owner

Shanghai 3-26-89

1-17

f

1908

Shaoxing (Z)

n

1940

1-18

f

1950

Yuyao (Z)

y

—

domestic servant

Shanghai 3-26-89

schoolteacher

Los Angeles 5-17-91 5-18-91

1-19

m

1932

Changzhou (J)

n

1947

shop assistant

Los Angeles 6-29-91 6-30-91

1-20

f

1929

Suzhou (J)

n

1942

1-21

m

1917

Ningbo (Z)

y

—

schoolteacher

Oswego, N.Y. 8-3-92

small merchant

Shanghai 7-14-93 8-11-95

1-22

m

1911

Zhongshan (G)

n

1933

businessman

Shanghai 7-14-93 8-3-95

1-23

f

1919

Fanyu(G)

n

1935

office worker

Hong Kong 6-2-94

1-24

m

1921

Fanyu (G)

n

1928

doctor

Hong Kong 6-2-94

List of Informants

No."

Sex

Year Born

1-25

m

1905

Native Place

Born in SH

Moved to SH

Shanghai

Occupationb teacher

/

331

Interview Location and Date Shanghai 7-15-93 7-16-93 7-29-95 8-2-95

1-26

f

1913

Changshu (J)

n

1938

Shanghai

nurse

8-6-93 8-17-93 1-27

m

1924

Huainan (A)

n

1936

Shanghai

bus driver

3-24-89 8-10-95 1-28

m

1918

Huzhou (Z)

n

1940

mill office worker

Shanghai 8-7-95 8-13-96

1-29

m

1916

Yuyao (Z)

n

1929

Shanghai

accountant

8-7-95 8-13-96 1-30

m

1912

Shangyu (Z)

y

—

Shanghai

businessman

8-11-96 1-31

m

1917

Shangyu (Z)

y

—

Shanghai

businessman

8-11-96 1-32

m

1917

Taicang (J)

n

1933

Shanghai

businessman

8-11-96 1-33

m

1917

Chuansha (J)

n

1925

Shanghai

businessman

8-11-96 1-34

f

1919

Zhongshan (G)

n

1939

schoolteacher

Shanghai 8-12-96

1-35

m

1922

Fanyu (G)

n

1940

photographer

Shanghai 8-12-96

1-36

f

1911

Jinhua (Z)

n

1934

office worker

Shanghai 8-18-96

1-37

f

1927

Ningbo (Z)

y

—

nurse

Shanghai 8-19-96

1-38

f

1923

Qidong (J)

n

1930

housewife

Shanghai 8-19-96 Continued on next page

332

/

Appendix

2 Born

Moved

Year

Native

in

to

Place

SH

SH

n

1938

No."

Sex

Born

1-39

m

1915

Tonglin (A)

Interview Location Occupationb peddler

and

Date

Shanghai 8-20-96

1-40

m

1927

Jiangyin (J)

n

1940

peddler

Shanghai

1-41

m

1925

H u z h o u (Z)

n

1936

fortune-teller

Shanghai

8-20-96

8-21-96 NOTE: Abbreviations in the table are: m = male, f = female, (A) = Anhui, (G) = Guangdong, (H) = Hubei, (J) = Jiangsu, (SH) = Shanghai, (Z) = Zhejiang, y = yes, n = no. " Informants are cited in the text by code, such as "1-1." The interviews were conducted with the understanding that names of the informants would not be released, with a few exceptions where the interviewees had no qualms about disclosing their identity. b The column "Occupation" shows each informant's occupation of longest duration prior to 1949, if applicable.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 . On the indigenous growth of pre-treaty-port Shanghai, see Linda Johnson, Shanghai; on the presence of the West in the city, see Nicholas Clifford, Spoilt Children; on local circuit intendants, or Daotai, see Leung Yuen-sang, Shanghai Taotai; on the Mixed Court, see Thomas Stephens, Order and Discipline; on traditional merchant organizations, see Joseph Fewsmith, Party; on modern entrepreneurship both Chinese and Western, see Marie-Claire Bergère, Golden Age, and Sherman Cochran, Big Business; on relations between the capitalist class and the Guomindang government, see Parks Coble Jr., Shanghai Capitalists, and Christian Henriot, Shanghai, ìyiy-iyjj; on public health, see Kerrie MacPherson, Wilderness; on higher education, see Wen-hsin Yeh, Alienated Academy, and M i n g K. Chan and Arif Dirlik, Schools; on the police, see Frederic Wakeman, Policing Shanghai and Shanghai Badlands; on the underworld, see Brian Martin, Shanghai Green Gang, and Pan Ling, Old Shanghai; on labor strikes and labor conditions, see Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike, and E m i l y Honig, Sisters; on the student movement, see Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Student Protests; on native-place associations, see B r y n a Goodman, Native Place; on social biases based on native place, see Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity; on intellectual life, see Poshek Fu, Passivity; on the world of prostitution, see Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasure. 2. On the new county histories produced as the result of the program, see Vermeer, " N e w County Histories." Shanghaishi tongzhiguan had produced a number of original works (including journals, pamphlets, and annuals) that are still basic references for scholars of Shanghai. Their work was interrupted by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1 9 3 7 . A f t e r A u g u s t 1 9 4 5 , the group resumed under the name Shanghai wenxian weiyuanhui (Shanghai document committee) and continued to compile and publish Shanghai annuals (nianjian) and local gazetteers. The group finally disbanded at the end of the Nationalist regime.

333

334

/

Notes to Pages

2-4

3. Most noticeably, Tang Zhenchang and Shen Hengchun, Shanghai shi (History of Shanghai), a single-volume general history of Shanghai that covers the period from ancient times to 1949, and Zhang Zhongli, Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu (Research on modern Shanghai City), a study of the economic, political-social, and cultural dimensions of the city from the late nineteenth century to 1949. Other major publications on the history of Shanghai include the two-volume Shanghai jindai shi (The history of modern Shanghai), edited by Liu Huiwu (Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 1985, 1987), the two-volume collection of treatises Shanghai shi yanjiu (Research on the history of Shanghai) (Shanghai: Xuelin Press, 1984, 1988), a series called Shanghai yanjiu luncong (Papers on Shanghai studies), of which so far nine volumes have been published by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, and a reminiscences series called Shanghai difang shi ziliao xuanji (Selected collections of materials on Shanghai local history), of which six volumes have appeared. The Committee of Shanghai Literature and History (Shanghai wenshi ziliao bianji weiyuanhui) has published special topic volumes in its wenshi ziliao (literature and history) series, including volumes on Shanghai's gangster organizations (liumang banghui), real estate, finance, education, and so on. A volume on social vices (yan, du, chang, or drugs, gambling, and prostitution) has been published by the Shanghai Institute of Culture and History (Shanghaishi wenshi guan). Rare historical materials have been reprinted, many under the title Shanghai shi ziliao congkan (Collections of historical materials of Shanghai), published by Shanghai renmin chubanshe, and Shanghaitan yu Shanghairen (Shanghai and the Shanghai people) published by Shanghai guji chubanshe. 4. For example, a number of symposia on the history of modern Shanghai jointly sponsored by American and Chinese institutions have been held in the United States and China. A n international conference on the history of Shanghai was held at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in September 1988, and the papers presented at the conference were published in both Chinese (Shanghai yanjiu luncong, volumes 3 and 4 under the English title, Shanghai: Gateway to the World) and in English (Shanghai Sojourners, edited by Wakeman and Yeh). In August 1993, two international symposia on Shanghai's history and economic development were held in the city, entitled respectively "Port Opening—Opening to the World: Shanghai over the Recent 1 5 0 Years, 1 8 4 3 - 1 9 9 3 , " and "Urban Progress, Business Development, and Chinese Modernization." From 1992 to 1995, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences conducted joint programs with the University of California at Berkeley and Cornell University on twentieth-century Shanghai. Sponsored by the Luce Foundation, three international conferences on the business and cultural history of Shanghai were held (convened by Sherman Cochran) at Cornell University in the summers of 1992, 1994, and 1995. A volume of papers from the 1 9 9 5 conference is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. 5. Mote, "Transformation," 1 0 2 - 3 ; Skinner, "Introduction," 2 5 8 - 6 1 . 6. Weber, City, 8 1 - 8 2 .

Notes to Pages 4-12

/

335

7. Skinner, "Introduction," 265-67; Mote, "Transformation," 1 1 4 - 1 8 . 8. Elvin, "Chinese Cities," 87. 9. Sima Qian, Shiji, 1243 (juan 25, lushu 3). 10. Gu Yanwu, Ri zhi lu, 20. 1 1 . Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 29. 12. Wang Yingxia, Wang Yingxia zizhuan, 201; Shehui ribao, August 8, 1936. For a detailed account of the beggars, see Lu, "Becoming Urban." 1 3 . Jiang Siyi and Wu Yuanshu, Shanghai qibai ge qigai de shehui diaocha, 1 9 1 ; Siao, Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars, 77. 14. Shen Ji et al., Zhongguo mimi shehui, 188. 1 5 . Isaacs, Five Years of Kuomintang Reaction, 6 2 - 6 3 ; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 84. 16. Mote, "Transformation," 102. 17. "Zoujin tianbian, haobuguo Huangpujiang liangbian" literally means "To explore up to the edge of the world, there is no place better than the two banks of the Huangpu River." See Hu Zude, Huyan, 52. 18. Hu Zude, Huyan waibian, 18; Qian Nairong, Shanghai fangyan liyu, 115. 19. Lu Xun, Diary, 108. 20. The story was published in thirty-five installments in Shenbao, from October 3 0 , 1 9 3 1 , to December 3 , 1 9 3 1 . It is summarized and commented on in Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 2 2 5 - 2 7 . 21. Mao Tun [Mao Dun], Midnight, 1 4 - 2 4 . 22. Yu Dafu, Yu Dafu wenji, 4:27. 23. See ibid., 9 : 2 - 1 8 5 . 24. Yu Dafu, Night. 25. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 227. 26. Wakeman and Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners, 12. 27. For a definition of these terms see Reynolds, China, 1898-1912, 207 n. 2. 28. Wang Tao, Yingru zazhi, 7 - 1 1 ; Chen Duxiu, Duxiu wencun, 587-996. 29. Informant I - 1 1 , March 25,1989; I-12. (Informants are cited by code; see appendix 2 for details.) 30. Up to 1980, Shanghai accounted for one-eighth of China's national industrial production and contributed one-sixth of total national income annually; one-third of the central government's revenue came from taxes levied on Shanghai. See Jiefang ribao, October 3 , 1 9 8 0 . 3 1 . This PLA unit was formed in Laiyang, Shangdong, in 1947. For official information about the unit, see Jiefangjun wenyishe, Nanjing Lu shang Haobalian. 32. The drama had several slightly different versions and was also adapted into a movie by the same title. In 1963, all top Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong, saw the drama in person. Their attendance was made into much publicized events, which aimed to show the whole country the extent of official support of the drama and the moral teachings that it promoted. See Shen Xi-

336

/

Notes to Pages

12-17

meng et al., Nihongdeng xia de shaobing; and Nanjing shifan xueyuan zhongwenxi, "Nihongdeng xia de shaobing" zhuanji. 33. Quote from Rozman, Modernization of China, 3. 34. The aptly named Long Bar was 1 1 0 feet in length and generally agreed to be the longest in the world. See Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions, 388; and Barber, Fall of Shanghai, illustrations after page 1 2 4 . 35. In the late 1980s, Shanghai still had about 800,000 to 1 million coal stoves and nightsoil buckets in use. For details see chapters 5 and 6. 36. See chapter 6 for details. 37. Appendix 1 , "Patterns of Obtaining Clothing"; I-4; I-23. 38. I-9, I - 2 1 . Getting to work on foot was common among factory workers. Sometimes a single trip to the mill took one to two hours. See Honig, Sisters, 1 3 7 . 39. See Z h u Zijia, Huangpu jiang, 7 0 - 7 2 , for a discussion of Shanghai style astuteness, in particular an insider's comparison of how business is conducted by the peoples of Shanghai and Hong Kong (or Shanghainese and Cantonese). 40. The French inventor Georges Claude invented neon lighting in 1907. In 1 9 1 0 , Claude demonstrated his first neon sign at the Grand Palais in Paris. Neon was soon adopted by the lighting industry for commercial use. B y the late 1920s, neon lighting had already been widely used for colorful street signs and commercial advertisements. In Shanghai, the term "nihongdeng" (a semitransliteration of "neon light") applied liberally to all city lights (or commercial lights, which included fluorescent and electronic lighting). See Claude, "Neon Tube Lighting"; "Broadway's Colors" (New York Times, January 23, 1929); Miller and Fink, Neon Signs, 1 - 5 . See also Tang Zhenchang, Jindai Shanghai fanhua lu, 170. 4 1 . See Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China. 42. See for instance Bernhardt, Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance. 43. See Murphey, Shanghai, Key to Modern China. 44. A few works on Shanghai have been produced that emphasize the continuity of Chinese social and institutional practices. Linda Johnson's works on Shanghai from market town to early treaty port emphasize the commercial prosperity of Ming-Qing Shanghai and the perdurability of Chinese institutions in the first fifteen years of Shanghai as a treaty-port city. This conclusion is consistent with the field's broader research on the socioeconomic history of the lower Yangzi delta region in the late imperial period. Frederic Wakeman's research on Shanghai police in the Nanjing decade ( 1 9 2 7 - 3 7 ) is "about connections and continuities"; it seeks to link a variety of political processes from the late Qing reforms to the Beijing Committee on State Security of 1989 (Policing Shanghai, xvii). In a study of everyday life in Shanghai's Bank of China, Wen-hsin Yeh shows how Confucian values continued to influence management style in a seemingly unquestionable Western-type institution: Yeh suggests that the corporate-sponsored communalism of the bank in Republican Shanghai bore similarities to the work-unit (danwei) system adopted

Notes to Pages 18-27

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in urban China after the Communist revolution ("Corporate Space, Communal Time"). 45. Huang, "Paradigmatic Crisis," 335. 46. See chapter 5 for details. 47. On urban neighborhood organizations in the People's Republic of China (PRC), see Schurmann, Ideology, 3 7 1 - 8 0 ; Whyte and Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China, 2 2 - 2 5 , 283-90. 48. See Habermas, Structural Transformation. For a discussion on the application of Habermas's ideas to analyzing recent Chinese history, see Rowe, "Public Sphere." The issue is further debated in a Modern China symposium (19, no. 2, April 1993). In Hong Kong, the Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly published a group of articles by both Chinese and Western scholars on "Civil Society and China" (August 1 5 , 1 9 9 3 ) . The leading history journal in the PRC, Lishi yanjiu (Historical research), also devoted an issue (no. 1 [1996]) to the discussion. 49. Rowe, Hankow, 6 1 - 6 2 , 136; Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 1 6 7 - 6 8 , 290-91. 50. Bestor, Neighborhood Tokyo, 66-77. 5 1 . Lee, Introduction, 1 5 - 1 6 . CHAPTER 1 . G O I N G TO S H A N G H A I

1 . Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 271. 2. This area centered on Nanking Road and was bounded by the Bund on the east, Tibet Road on the west, the southern bank of Suzhou Creek on the north, and Yangjingbang Creek (later transformed into Avenue Edward VII) on the south. 3. "Pudong" literally means "east of the Huangpu River." In the 1990s, this rural area finally caught the attention of Chinese urban planners and has become the fastest developing area of Shanghai. In 1996, the Pudong New Area (Pudong xinqu) was a Special Economic Zone of 201 square miles (522 square kilometers) with a population of 1.48 million. Like that of Shenzhen (in Guangdong province) in the 1980s, Pudong's development is seen as the symbol of China's dramatic economic growth and social transformation in the 1990s. For a comprehensive narrative on Pudong, see Wang Hongquan et al., Pudong jingu daguan. 4. However, the notion that Shanghai was virtually nothing prior to the coming of the West has lingered in some recent writings. For example, Seagrave's Soong Dynasty describes Shanghai thus: "In the early 1800, just before the Soongs came on stage, the old Chinese city was just a village on the muddy banks of the Whangpoo [Huangpu] River" (3). 5. The Shanghai Daotai was one of the ninety-two Daotais under the provincial government in the Qing period. On the Daotai institution in the Qing administrative system, see Leung Yuen-sang, Shanghai Taotai, chapter 2. 6. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 91.

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7. These statistics were calculated by the author from Hu Huanyong, Zhongguo renkou, 53, tables 2 - 1 1 . 8. Fairbank, Trade, 3 5 7 - 6 1 ; Huang Wei, Shanghai kaibu chuqi duiwai maoyi yanjiu, 75-78. 9. Morse, International Relations, 1 1 3 5 6 - 5 8 ; Huang Wei, Shanghai kaibu chuqi duiwai maoyi yanjiu, 1 7 7 - 7 8 , tables 25-26. 10. This is a modification of the more rigid Maoist view of treaty-port cities as entirely harmful to China. Recent scholarship in China justifies a positive assessment of the role of treaty ports by citing Engels's words that violence or "evil" forces can be revolutionary and Marx's comments on British rule in India, viz., that the Britons served as the "unconscious tool of history" in creating social revolution in India. See Tang and Shen, Shanghai shi, 1 5 6 - 5 7 ; Zhang Zhongli, Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu, 3 2 - 3 3 . 1 1 . The following paragraph from a book about modern Shanghai written by an American soon after the Communist revolution typified the former mentality: "The stubborn marauders from the West dug their toes into the [Yangzi] delta and stayed: throughout the land they built great cities, of which Shanghai was the greatest. These Western conquerors could not be absorbed as China had absorbed other conquerors. They stood aloof, resisting Oriental influence, until their power weakened and they were forced to withdraw, leaving their cities, as well as their political and cultural imprints, behind them." Finch, Shanghai and Beyond, 3. For the latter view, see Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 34. 1 2 . Johnson, Shanghai, chapter 2; Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation, 48-50; Lu, "Arrested Development." 1 3 . Zou, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 3 8 - 4 1 ; Hu Huanyong, Zhongguo renkou, 49. This sometimes led to the impression that the people of Shanghai were all immigrants. An article published in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao (August 10, 1900) declared that "the people of Shanghai are all sojourners, and there are no natives." 14. Calculations are based on Zou Yiren, jiu Shanghai renkou, tables 1 and 46. 15. Shanghaitong she, Shanghai yanjiu ziliao, 1 : 1 1 3 ; Xu Gongsu and Qiu Jinzhang, Shanghai gonggong zujie zhidu, 1 9 - 2 0 , 68. For the English version of the Shanghai Land Regulations of 1845, see North China Herald, January 1 7 , 1 8 5 2 . 16. Maybon and Fredet, Histoire, chapter 2. 17. Morse, International Relations, 2 : 3 4 9 - 5 0 . Morse was a commissioner in the Chinese customs service who lived in Shanghai for many years and wrote extensively on modern Chinese history. 18. Fortune, Tea-Districts, 2:2. 19. Imperial Maritime Customs, Treaties, 1:200. 20. For the correspondence between Qiying and Emperor Daoguang in this regard, see Chouban yiwu shimo, Daoguang Section, vols. 67, 69, 70. For both

Notes to Pages 3 1 - 3 5

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English and Chinese versions of the Bogue Treaty, see Imperial Maritime Customs, Treaties, 1 9 8 - 2 0 7 . 21. On the Qing government's intentions in this regard, see Lu Hanchao, '"Shanghai Tudi Zhangcheng' yanjiu." 22. Chinese and Japanese Repository 2, no. 18 (January 1865): 32. 23. Lang, Shanghai, Considered Socially, 22. 24. Chinese and Japanese Repository 2, no. 1 5 (October 1864): 79-88. 25. Lang, Shanghai, Considered Socially, 24; Shanghai Mercury, Shanghai, 184.3-1893, 3. 26. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 9 0 - 9 1 ; Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, 1 : 2 9 2 . 27. When Robert Fortune revisited Shanghai in September 1848, three years after his last visit, he was surprised by the numerous ships on the Huangpu River. He was more surprised by the appearance of the Bund: "I had heard that many English and American houses had been built, indeed one or two were being built before I left China; but a new town, of very considerable size, now occupied the place of wretched Chinese hovels, cotton fields, and tombs." Tea-Districts, 2 : 1 - 2 . 28. Kuai Shixun, Shanghai gonggong zujie, 318. 29. Lang, Shanghai, Considered Socially, 35. 30. Dyce, Model Settlement, 1 1 1 - 1 2 . 3 1 . Fortune, Three Years' Wanderings, 1 1 4 . 32. By the lunar calendar, this was the fifth day of the eighth month, the birthday of Confucius. 33. For a firsthand Western account of the rebellion, see A British Resident, Twelve Years in China, 1 8 7 - 2 1 9 . A comprehensive source on the rebellion is Shanghai shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo, Shanghai Xiaodaohui qiyi shiliao huibian. For a well-researched history of the Small Swords, see Guo Yuming, Shanghai Xiaodaohui qiyi shi. 34. These houses served as the initial form of the lilong (alleyway) house, discussed in detail in chapter 4. 35. Although no exact rental or purchase prices were recorded, in general the profits from constructing houses for Chinese were 30 to 40 percent. See Zhu Jiancheng, "Jiu Shanghai fangdichan de xingqi," 1 1 . 36. De Jesus, Historical Shanghai, 100; Kuai Shixun, Shanghai gonggong zujie, 349. 37. De Jesus, Historical Shanghai, 98. 38. Alcock, Capital of the Tycoon, 3 7 - 3 8 . One source indicates that the merchant was Edwin Smith; see Shen Chenxian, "Shanghai zaoqi de jige waiguo fangdichan shang," 1 3 1 . 39. Alcock, Capital of the Tycoon, 38. 40. Ibid. 41. Feetham, Report, 1 : 5 4 - 6 2 ; Xu Gongsu and Qiu Jinzhang, Shanghai gonggong zujie zhidu, 4 3 - 6 7 . For a complete English version of the Shanghai

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Land Regulations effective in the Republican period, see Feetham, Report, 1 : 6 8 - 8 3 , Appendix 4. 42. Feetham, Report, 1 : 5 7 - 5 9 . 43. Ibid., 1:5c», appendix 2. 44. De Jesus, Historical Shanghai, 9 8 - 9 9 . See also Pott, Short History of Shanghai, 39. 45. Z o u Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 3 - 4 , 9 0 - 9 1 . 46. In the late Qing, these counties (xian) belonged to six prefectures (/M), namely, Suzhou, Songjiang, and Taicang in Jiangsu province, and Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and H u z h o u in Zhejiang province. 47. Chouban yiwu shimo, Daoguang Section, vol. 29; Chouban yiwu shimo, Xianfeng Section, vol. 7. 48. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, 1 8 . 49. See, for example, Hongzhi Shanghai zhi, juan 1 : 4 - 5 ; Shanghai bowuguan, Shanghai beike ziliao xuanji, 3 8 - 3 9 ; Shanghai renmin chubanshe, Qingdai riji huichao, passim; Tongzhi Shanghai xianzhi, juan, 2 : 1 . 50. W u G u i f a n g , Gudai Shanghai shulue, 8 1 - 8 9 ; Wang Tao, Yingru zazhi, 9 - 1 0 . 5 1 . Y i ' a n zhuren, Hujiang shangye shijing ci, 4 : 2 1 . 5 2 . Forbes, Five Years in China, 1 3 - 1 4 . 5 3 . Y u Q i u y u , Wenming de suipian, 2 0 1 . 54. Sergeant, Shanghai, 3. 5 5 . Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao, 22; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 1 4 6 - 4 7 . 56. I - 2 1 , A u g u s t 1 1 , 1 9 9 5 . 57. Barber, Fall of Shanghai, 1 3 . 58. Gascoyne-Cecil and Cecil, Changing China, 1 0 4 - 5 . 59. Abend, Treaty Ports, 1 5 5 . 60. Power, My Twenty-five Years, 58. 6 1 . Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, xia: 8 8 - 8 9 . 62. The number of Sikh policemen in the International Settlement rose f r o m 296 in 1 9 0 0 to 1 , 8 4 2 in 1 9 3 9 ; see Wei, Shanghai, 1 0 5 . 63. Ross, Escape to Shanghai, xi; Heppner, Shanghai Refuge, 48. See also Pan Guang, Jews in Shanghai. 64. According to an investigation of the Japanese consulate general in Shanghai in October 1 9 2 8 , out of a total 2 , 1 7 8 Japanese females w h o worked in Shanghai, 628 (or 29 percent) were prostitutes. See Gongshang banyuekan 2, no. 8 (April 1 9 3 0 ) : 2 3 - 2 5 . 65. Chunshenjun, " Z e n y a n g weichi Shanghai de fanrong." 66. North China Daily News, A u g u s t 1 2 , 1 9 3 7 . 67. For an account of foreigners' experience at the time of the Communist takeover, see Barber, Fall of Shanghai; for a glimpse of the end of foreign Shanghai, see Tata and McLachlan's extraordinary photo collection, Shanghai, 194968. Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao zhong zhi Shanghai, 22; Shanghaishi nianjian

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1936; X u Run, Xu Yuzhai zixu nianpu, 2 9 5 - 9 7 ; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian, tables 1 , 22, 50. 69. This depends on the measure one chooses. According to the most detailed demographic statistics available on Shanghai, the city's population in 1 8 5 2 was 544,413 (including the rural suburban areas of Shanghai county); about a century later, in March 1949, the population of the city proper was 5,455,007 (Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 9 0 - 9 1 ) . According to Fortune, Shanghai's population was about 270,000 in 1 8 4 3 (Three Years' Wanderings, 104). Thus, as far as the city proper is concerned, the population increased twentyfold from 1 8 4 3 to 1949. 70. The native-to-nonnative ratio in the Chinese districts was slightly higher since the Chinese districts included certain rural areas where inhabitants were mostly Shanghai natives. No data on the native-to-nonnative ratio are available for the French Concession. But the 1 9 4 7 - 4 9 surveys on the three districts (Songshan, Lujiawan, and Changshu) that formerly made up the French Concession found that the populations of nonnatives in these districts were as high as 90 percent of the total. See Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 1 1 2 - 1 3 , tables 20 and 2 1 . 7 1 . Shanghaishi nianjian, 1947, O 1 5 ; Shanghaishi renmin zhengfu, yijiu sijiu nian, 1 4 - 5 ; Hu Huanyong, Zhongguo renkou, 49. 72. Based on figures in the International Settlement in 1 9 3 0 and 1 9 3 5 ; see Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao, table 43; Shanghaishi nianjian, 1 9 3 5 , 0 : 2 3 - 2 4 ; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, table 22. 73. Shanghaishi renmin zhengfu, Yijiu sijiu nian, 2 0 - 2 1 ; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, table 24. 74. Shanghai Civic Association, Statistics of Shanghai, 4, table 5; Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao, 27, tables 4 1 , 43. 75. Shehui yuekan 1 , no. 4 (April 1929): 3 - 5 . 76. See appendix 1 , " T y p e of Respondent's Hometown Prior to Moving to Shanghai." 77. Fang Hongkai and Huang Yanpei, Chuansha xianzhi, preface and introduction of juan 5 (Industry). Today Chuansha is one of ten counties under the administration of the Shanghai municipal government. 78. Chesneaux, Chinese Labor Movement, 48. 79. The workers in Shanghai's machine-building enterprises were among the earliest modern industrial workers in China. Because these workers were employed in Shanghai's foreign shipyards as early as the 1 8 5 0 s (Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, 1 : 3 8 4 - 9 1 ) , orthodox Chinese Communist historiography regards them as China's first proletarians. The orthodox position goes on to argue that the Chinese proletariat appeared earlier than the Chinese capitalists, who were mainly a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon. Investigation of Shanghai's machine-building enterprises shows that workers in this industry hailed mainly from three areas: Guangdong province, Ningbo (in Zhejiang province), and local villages around Shanghai.

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The earliest industrial workers in Shanghai's machine-building industry were mechanics from Guangdong. They were part of what Elizabeth Perry terms the "South China artisans" (Shanghai on Strike, 32). Since the city was becoming China's leading commercial port in mid-nineteenth century, these shipyards were designed mainly for repairing trade ships, and workers with special skills such as coppersmithing were particularly needed. The majority of these skilled workers were from Xiangshan (now Zhongshan) county in Guangdong. In the early 1860s, Hongkou (the northeastern part of Shanghai) was a spacious area where Shanghai's shipyards and docks were gathered; all the workers there were said to be Cantonese (Shanghai xinbao, Oct. 6, 1862). By the late 1870s, workers from Ningbo and local villages gradually outnumbered those from Guangdong (Shanghaishi gongshang, Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye, 1 : 5 0 - 7 0 ; Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, 3 6 - 3 7 ) . 80. Shanghaishi gongshang, Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye, 1:52, 5 5 - 5 6 . 81. Ibid., 1 : 5 5 - 5 6 . 82. Ibid.; Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, 3 5 - 4 0 . 83. Official statistics showed that in 1 9 2 8 - 3 0 , 42 percent of Shanghai's industrial workers were working in cotton mills, and 32 percent in spinning, weaving, or dyeing factories. In other words, about three-quarters of Shanghai's industrial workers were employed in textiles (Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo chengdu, 7). This was the peak number of Shanghai's textile workers. But even after the devastating war of 1 9 3 7 - 4 5 ar>d the Communist takeover in 1949, a survey conducted in April 1 9 5 1 still showed that 205,000 people worked in Shanghai's textile industries, or about 30 percent of the city's total of 750,000 industrial workers (Shanghai fangzhi gongren yundong shi, Shanghai fangzhi gongren yundong shi, 39; Jiefang ribao she, Shanghai jiefang yinian, 74-75). 84. Li Cishan, Shanghai laodong, 8 - 9 . 85. For instance, workers from Pudong (a mainly rural area on the eastern side of the Huangpu River) worked in factories in Puxi (on the western side of the river) but still lived in their villages, crossing the river by ferry each day to go to work. Li Cishan, Shanghai laodong, 8. 86. Ibid., 8 - 9 . 87. Lamson, "Effect," 1062. 88. Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang," 3. 89. Jiangnan, Jiangnan zaochuan changshi, 2 2 - 2 4 ; Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Jiangnan zaochuanchang changshi, 86-87. 90. Huang Wei and Xia Lingen, Jindai Shanghai diqu fangzhi jingji shiliao xuanji, 336. 91. Ibid., 339; Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Liu Hongsheng qiye shiliao, 2:295. 92. Wang Zhong and Hu Renfeng, Fahuaxiang zhi, juan 2 (Customs).

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93. Wang Wei and Xia Lingen, ]indai Shanghai diqu fangzhi jingji shiliao xuanji, 336. 94. Xinwen bao, October 30, 1930, reported that according to the Shanghai Public Bureau, there were 49,190 "servants" in Shanghai. Official statistics in January 1950 reported 94,203 "family servants" in the city at that time (Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 1 1 1 ) . 95. Hu Zude, Huyan, 52. 96. Edkins, Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, 1 8 1 ; Hu Zude, Huyan, 46. 97. Powell, My Twenty-five Years in China, 7. 98. Yang Hao and Ye Lan, Jiu Shanghai fengyun renwu, 324. 99. Zhang Ailing, Zhang Ailing wenji, 4:20. 100. Zhongguo kexueyuan Shanghai jingji yanjiusuo, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao, 308. 1 0 1 . Shehui yuekan 1 , no. 5 (April 1929): 6. 102. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo, "Ba yi san," 3 9 5 - 4 1 6 . 103. In early 1950, right after the Communists took power in Shanghai, many industries were brought to a standstill by frequent labor disputes. Sending workers back to their home villages on a rotation basis was one of the main solutions for making peace between business owners and employees (Jiefang ribao she, 1950,62). Indeed, factory workers and other working people were often the major targets of the authorities' efforts to control the city's population after 1949. In two major campaigns of "mobilizing people to return to their homes in the countryside" in 1 9 5 5 - 5 6 and 1 9 5 8 - 6 2 , it was mainly factory workers who were sent to their native places in the countryside or to factories in the rural hinterland. According to household registration data of the Public Security Bureau, in the single year of 1955, 847,293 people were moved out of Shanghai; among them, 779,138 were residents of Shanghai proper. See Shanghaishi gong'anju huzhengchu, Shanghaishi renkou ziliao huibian, 12; Hu Huanyong, Zhongguo renkou, 78-80. 104. See chapter 2 for details. 105. Lamson, "Effect," 1062. 106. For a complete list of these organizations see Zhang Zhongli, Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu, 5 1 2 - 1 3 , 5 1 8 - 2 2 . 107. Shanghai yanjiu zhongxin, Shanghai 700 nian, 195. 108. Yang Hao and Ye Lan, Jiu Shanghai fengyun renwu, 202-9. 109. The practice, however, was criticized by the media in Hunan. Newspapers there attacked Mu for taking advantage of the cheaper labor in his native province and exploiting rural women workers. Debates on the correctness of this recruitment policy continued for more than a year and even drew the attention of Chen Duxiu, who moved this debate to his radical journal Xin Qingnian (New Youth) in order to draw nationwide attention to labor issues. See Xin Qingnian 7, no. 6 (May 1920): 1 - 2 . 1 1 0 . Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Liu Hongsheng qiye shiliao, 2 : 3 1 6 - 1 8 .

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i n . Hengfeng yinranchang, Rartchang jinxi, 3. 1 1 2 . Shanghaishi liangshiju, Zhongguo

jindai mianfen gongye shi, 1 9 1 -

93' 1991 1 3 . See, for example, Chen Boxi, Lao Shanghai; and Haishang mingren zhuan bianjibu, Haishang mingren zhuan. 1 1 4 . Xiong Yuezhi, "Zatan 'Shanghai ren.'" 1 1 5 . See Edkins, Vocabulary, i v - v i , for rules of symbols; and Edkins, Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, 1 3 - 4 6 , on the Shanghai tones and the relation of tones to accents. 1 1 6 . Mcintosh, Useful Phrases. 1 1 7 . Xu Baohua and Tang Zhenzhu, Shanghai shiqu fangyan zhi, 3 - 4 ; Qian Nairong, Shanghai fangyan liyu, 73. 1 1 8 . However, to call someone "Little Jiangbei" might have been considered offensive because of the general discrimination against people from Subei or Jiangbei (generally, the region immediately north of the Yangzi River). 1 1 9 . In 1990 a survey of 438 Shanghai residents who had lived in the city for at least four decades found that more than half of the first-generation immigrants still spoke the Shanghai dialect with some accent, 32.7 percent still spoke with a heavy accent, and more than 5 percent simply spoke no Shanghainese at all. Even among third-generation (or later) immigrants, a quarter still spoke the Shanghai dialect with an accent, which they had picked up from their parents or grandparents. See appendix 1 , "The Persistence of Native Accents." 120. Liu Meijun, "Shanghai nanzi shenghuo zhier." 1 2 1 . Yang Peiming, "Kang Youwei zai Shanghai de yusuo"; Shanghaishi Changningqu, Changningqu dimingzhi, 146; Chen Lizheng and Yuan Enzhen, Xinya de licheng, 1 - 2 . 1 2 2 . The current address is 1 5 1 7 Huaihaizhong Road. The Shanghai municipal government now lists the residence as a "cultural relics preservation site" (shiji wenwu baohu danwei). See Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu, Shanghai Xuhui zhuzhai, 1 2 . 1 2 3 . Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu, Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu dimingzhi, 345. 124. Following is a list of a few of the most dominant political figures and their residences in Shanghai: Name Address Sun Yat-sen ( 1 8 6 6 - 1 9 2 5 ) Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek, 1888-1975) Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong, 1894-1971) Song Qingling (Madame Sun, 1893-1981) Jiang Weiguo ( 1 9 1 6 - )

7 Xiangshan Road, Luwan District 9 Dongping Road, Xuhui District 1 4 5 Yueyang Road, Xuhui District 45 Taojiang Road, Xuhui District 1843 Huaihaizhong Road, Xuhui District

Notes to Pages 56-58 Cai Yuanpei ( 1 8 6 8 - 1 9 4 0 ) Sun Ke ( 1 8 9 1 - 1 9 7 3 )

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303 Huashan Road #16, Jing'an District 1 2 6 2 Yan'anxi Road, Changning District

After 1949, a number of private homes were turned into luxurious (and also secret) residences to house top communist leaders Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and others when they visited Shanghai. Even in the 1990s, when Deng Xiaoping was in Shanghai, he stayed at the Xijiao Hotel, which was previously the private home of a Yao family. The images of these luxurious homes are captured in Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu fangchan guanliju, Shanghai Xuhui zhuzhai. 1 2 5 . See Zhang Kaiyuan's preface for Yue Zheng, Jindai Shanghairen shehui xintai. 126. In 1878, the monthly salary of an ordinary comprador was 40 taels. Higher ranking compradors received 500 to 800 taels per month in 1932. See Hao, Comprador, 89-94; Wu Peichu, "Jiu Shanghai waishang yinhang maiban," 1 1 0 . 1 2 7 . Nie Baozhang, Zhongguo maiban zichan jieji, 1 6 1 - 6 4 . 128. For instance, the Xi family, a well-known comprador clan, had its start on the road to wealth during the Taiping Rebellion, when Xi Pingfang moved his family from Dongshan (near Suzhou) to Shanghai. Xi went into business in Shanghai and married the sister of Shen Eryuan, a wealthy merchant and fellow Dongshan native who had moved to Shanghai earlier. Xi sent all four sons to work in Shanghai's foreign banks. By the early twentieth century, the four had become quite successful compradors. In following years, during the Republican period, Xi's grandsons, great-grandsons, in-laws, and other relatives were compradors in Shanghai. A. Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions, 540; Wu Peichu, "Jiu Shanghai waishang yinhang maiban," 9 6 - 1 0 9 . 129. The official name was adopted after the 1 9 1 1 revolution. 1 3 0 . Huang Yifeng et al., ]iu Zhongguo minzu zichan jieji, 2 8 9 - 9 1 . 1 3 1 . Coble, Shanghai Capitalists, 24; Zhang Zhongli, findai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu, 7 2 1 . 1 3 2 . Zhongguo renmin yinhang, Shanghai qianzhuang shiliao, 7 7 0 - 7 1 . 1 3 3 . Wang Jishen, Shanghai zhi fangdichanye, 5 2 - 6 1 . The powerful Zhejiang (or more specifically, Ningbo) presence in the formation of the Shanghai bourgeoisie has already been well described. See, for examples, Jones, "Ningpo Pang"; Rankin, Elite Activism, 8 8 - 8 9 , 1 7 6 - 8 3 ; Schoppa, Chinese Elites and Political Change, 169. 1 3 4 . Coble, Shanghai Capitalists, 27. 1 3 5 . Du Xuncheng, Minzu ziben zhuyi, 2 5 3 - 5 4 . According to an official survey conducted by the Shanghai Bureau of Social Affairs in 1929, the total number of factories in Shanghai was estimated at 2,326; see Wages and Hours of Labor of Greater Shanghai (1929), cited in D. K. Lieu, Growth, 62. 136. Bergère, Golden Age, 6. 1 3 7 . Calculated from Xu, State, 4 5 - 4 6 , 5 7 - 6 3 .

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138. Extra-Settlement roads were those constructed by the S M C and the French Concession authorities outside the official boundaries of the concessions. This had been an issue between the Chinese and foreign authorities since the early 1860s, when the latter started building "military roads and constructions" to obstruct the Taipings' several attempts to approach Shanghai. However, even after the Taiping Rebellion, the construction of roads continued for decades, mostly in the western and northeastern sections of the foreign concessions. The official expansion (i.e., sanctioned by the Chinese authorities) of the International Settlement in 1899 and the French Concession in 1 9 1 4 was virtually the Chinese government's recognition of a fait accompli. But roads and houses continued to be built after the official expansions of 1899 and 1 9 1 4 . The legal status of these newly built extra-Settlement roads became an irritant in the Nanjing decade as the Chinese tried to recover sovereignty over these areas. Many of Shanghai's elegant homes and best neighborhoods were located along these extra-Settlement roads, most of which were in west Shanghai (Huxi) and northeast of Hongkou. See Xu Gongsu and Qiu Jinzhang, "Shanghai gonggong zujie zhidu," chapters 3 and 4; Lu Hanchao, '"Shanghai Tudi Zhangcheng' yanjiu"; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 65-72. 139. Yu Jianhua, Zhongguo huihua shi, 2 : 1 9 6 - 9 7 . 140. Shenbao, February 28,1925, p. 7; Xu Ke, Qing bai lei chao, 3 7 : 6 6 - 6 7 . 1 4 1 . See, for example, Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 5 4 - 7 8 . 142. Tang Zhenchang and Shen Hengchun, Shanghai shi, 5 0 4 - 5 . 143. In 1939, for example, 92 of the city's total 245 sizable bookstores were located in these streets. Shanghai yanjiu zhongxin, Shanghai joo nian, 3 3 4 37; Zhu Lianbao, Jinxiandai Shanghai chubanye yinxiangji, 2, 6 - 7 . 144. Hu Shi, Sishi zishu, 1 4 4 - 4 5 . 145. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 154. 146. Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu, 1 ¡ 1 5 1 ; Wang Yingxia, Wang Yingxia zizhuan, 96. 147. Tang Hai, Zhongguo laodong wenti, 1 7 7 - 7 8 . 148. Cowley, Exile's Return, 5 5 - 5 6 . 149. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 5 - 7 . 150. Yeh, "Progressive Journalism and Shanghai's Petty Urbanites"; Wakeman and Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners, 12. 1 5 1 . Friedrichs, "Capitalism." 152. Based on a discussion with a group of sociologists and historians at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, July 22,1995. 153. I will delve into the details of shikumen communities when I discuss daily life of the common people in chapters 4 - 6 . 154. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 699. 155. It has been estimated that in 1 9 3 6 - 3 7 , on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, Shanghai had about 270,000 zhiyuan. See Shanghaishi zonggonghui, KangRi zhanzheng shiqi Shanghai gongren, 62. 156. Zou Yiren, ]iu Shanghai renkou bianqian de yanjiu, 2 6 - 3 7 , tables 1 , 15, and 16.

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347

157. For research of this type on Shanghai, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers; and Perry, Shanghai on Strike. 158. About 5 1 percent, or 388,420 out of 759,154 inhabitants. Calculated from Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard, table 25. 159. Ibid., 139. 160. See chapter 3 for details. 1 6 1 . Shanghaishi gongshang, Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye, 2: 810 - 1 1 ; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 2 4 1 - 4 2 . 162. See details in chapters 2 and 3. 163. Tang Hai, Zhongguo laodong wenti, 89; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 647, 673; Jiang Siyi and Wu Yuanshu, "Shanghai de qigai." 164. Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong"; Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao, 72; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 104; Shanghai shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo, Wusi yundong zai Shanghai shiliao, 1 1 , table 8. 165. See chapter 3 for details. About half of the population had virtually no occupation at all. The postrevolutionary government called the nonoccupational residents of Shanghai a "consumption population," in contrast to the "productive population" (that is, people who had an occupation or job). Rao Shushi, Shanghai's Communist Party chief and military head in the early 1950s, declared in his official address to the Shanghai Municipal Congress in August 1949 that there were about 3 million people in the city who belonged to the consumption population (Jiefang ribao she, Shanghai jiefang yinian, 7). Statistics also showed that in January 1950 the productive population (zaiye renkou) constituted 41.46 percent of the total population in Shanghai (Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 104), which means more than half the residents of Shanghai (mostly children, housewives, and the elderly) fell in the consumption population category. CHAPTER 2 . THE W O R L D OF RICKSHAWS

1 . For a general history of Harbin in English, see Clausen and Thogersen, Making of a Chinese City, especially pages 2 3 - 5 2 on the Russian influence in the city. 2. Hu Shi, Hu Shi wencun, 3 : 2 4 - 2 5 . Hu Shi had reason to be particularly sharp about rickshaws. A rickshaw-related incident dramatically changed his life (hence also affected the New Cultural Movement). In the spring of 1910, the then-nineteen-year-old Hu Shi was living in Nanlin Li (Alley of Southern Forest) on Haining Road in Hongkou and teaching Chinese at an SMCsponsored elementary school. Being young and associated with a group of what he called "romantic friends," Hu Shi was for a while on the loose, drinking, gambling, and frequenting brothels. One night, after a bout of heavy drinking in a brothel with his friends, Hu got blind drunk and staggered from the brothel alone, hiring a rickshaw home. Once he got on the rickshaw, Hu quickly fell asleep. It was midnight and raining. The rickshaw man saw an opportunity, robbed his drunken passenger, dumped him on the street, and then

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6y-68

ran away. Hu ended up spending the night in a police station, charged with attacking a policeman who tried to stop him while he was staggering and acting peculiarly on Haining Road. Hu also wounded himself wrestling with the policeman on the curbstones. The next morning Hu was fined $ 5 and allowed to go home. That day, looking at his swollen face in the mirror, he was overwhelmed with deep regret, not just for the incident, but more for his recent dissipation in general. "Without shedding a single tear," Hu Shi recalled twenty years afterward, "spiritually I had experienced a big change at that time." He then decided to start a new life by going to study in America. See Hu Shi, Sishi zishu, chapter 5. 3. Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale, 1 3 4 . 4. As the population of Shanghai increased, so did the number of rickshaws and rickshaw pullers. In 1920, the city had about 35,000 rickshaws for public hire and 12,000 private rickshaws. B y the mid-i920s, the number had increased to about 50,000 and 15,000, respectively. B y the end of the 1930s, the number of public-rickshaw pullers alone reached about 100,000. See Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang," 7 2 - 7 4 ; Tang Hai, Zhongguo laodongwenti, 89; Cai Binxian, "Cong nongcun pochan suo jichulai de renlichefu wenti," 37; Shanghaishi nianjian, i 9 3 5 : K 7 i ; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 673. 5. The invention of the rickshaw dated to 1 8 6 9 and has been attributed to various people in Japan, although perhaps not all were Japanese. Credence is generally given to the claim of Izumi Yosuke, who had a workshop at the foot of Nihombashi, where he embarked on the rickshaw business in 1869 (Waley, Tokyo, 1 6 7 - 6 8 ; Shanghai shenghuo 2, no. 2 [July 1938]: 1 3 ) . However, one author wrote, "According to the Americans, it was a missionary in Yokohama— a certain Reverend G l o b e — w h o converted a baby carriage to drag about his invalid wife in 1 8 6 9 and thus produced a prototype of what soon became the popular rickshaw named in Japan jin-rick-sha" (Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 1 2 ) . The Japan historian Seidensticker summarizes the controversy in this way: "Though the origins of the rickshaw are not entirely clear, they seem to be Japanese, and of Tokyo specifically. The most widely accepted theory offers the names of three inventors, and gives 1869 as the date of the invention" (Low City, High City, 42). 6. Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 2 4 8 49; Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 7 3 - 7 4 ; Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 1 1 - 1 2 . 7. Shenbao, August 18, 1 8 7 3 . 8. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 73 - 7 4 . 9. Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 796. The formal Chinese term for the rickshaw, renliche, has confirmed this meaning. 1 0 . Shanghaishi jiaotong yunshu ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 3 1 ; M a Xuexin et al., Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian, 5 9 1 and 594; Z h u Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 6 7 3 - 7 4 . 1 1 . Chinese Economic Monthly (May 1925): 35, cited in Fang Fu-an, "Rick-

Notes to Pages 69-72

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349

shaws in China," 798; Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 74. 12. Zheng Yimei, Shanghai jiuhua, 1 7 - 1 8 ; Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, zhong: 34. 1 3 . Regardless of the distance of the trip, in the 1920s and 1930s a taxi customer typically tipped the driver 1 0 - 2 0 cents; see Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 50. 14. China Weekly Review (April 7,1934): 214. 1 5 . Pal, Shanghai Saga, 1 7 1 . 16. According to a three-day survey in June 1889 of traffic on Willis Bridge at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek, rickshaws far outnumbered all other types of vehicles combined: Type of Vehicle Single-wheel carts Carriages Rickshaws Lorries (goods vehicles) Sedan chairs Horses

Number of Vehicles 2

>759 1,6 33 20,958 22 27 38

See Wei, Shanghai: Crucible of Modem China, 98, and Old Shanghai, 57; Yang Jiayou and He Mingyun, Ta qiao gujin tan, 108. Willis Bridge was the main route from the Bund and Nanking Road area to Hongkou and Yangshupu. It was reconstructed in 1909 and was also known as the Garden Bridge (today it is known as Waibaidu Bridge). It was a perfect place for surveying the city's traffic. 17. Shanghaishi jiaotong yunshu ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 32. 18. See Table 4. The population of Shanghai in the 1930s was about 3.5 million. See also Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 250. 19. Rickshaws for public hire were also called baoche (private vehicles). 20. Shanghaishi jiaotong yunshu ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 32. 21. Chinese Economic Monthly (May 1925): 35, cited in Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 798; Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 74. 22. Darwent, Shanghai, 99. 23. Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 1 0 - 1 1 . 24. Wu and Wakeman, Bitter Winds, 1 - 2 ; Zhang Biwu, "Zhu gongguan de baoche fu." 25. Strangers Always, 1 1 0 - 1 1 ; Wu and Wakeman, Bitter Winds, 2 - 3 . 26. The regular exchange rate in the late nineteenth century was one yuan (silver dollar) = 1 , 0 0 0 - 1 , 2 0 0 wen (copper coins), depending on the quality of the copper coins. 27. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 74 and 79. Ironically, Menard, the Frenchman who introduced the rickshaw to Shang-

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Notes to Pages

72-76

hai, did not make a fortune from the business. Two years after he opened the business, he became bankrupt and fled to Vladivostok. See Tu Shipin, Shanghai Chunqiu, zhong: 34. 28. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 74. 29. Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 252; Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale, 1 3 5 . 30. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 674. 3 1 . T. Wright, "Shanghai Imperialists," table 1 . 32. Johnstone, Shanghai Problem, 192; Ricsha Committee, "Report of the Ricsha Committee," 5 9 - 6 0 . Also, Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 1 0 , reports that "only 144 people owned the total of 68,000 rickshaw licenses issued in Shanghai." 33. Ricsha Committee, "Report of the Ricsha Committee," 6 0 - 6 7 ; Guo Chongjie, "Shanghaishi de renliche wenti," 23. The $750 fee included the rent of the vehicle. 34. Ricsha Committee, "Report of Ricsha Committee," 6 0 - 6 3 . 35. Guo Chongjie, "Shanghaishi de renliche wenti," 25-26. 36. The rickshaw racket was often in the headlines and became a hot issue in the mid-i93os when the S M C and Shanghai's Chinese municipal government tried to reform the business. For details see T. Wright, "Shanghai Imperialists." 37. The size of rickshaw families ranged from 2 to 8 persons. More than 85 percent of the households had 3 - 6 persons; see Cai Binxian, "Cong nongcun pochan suo jichulai de renlichefu wenti," 3 6 - 3 7 . 38. The number of rickshaw pullers grew to about 100,000 in the late 1930s, an increase of 20,000 from the mid-i93os. Most of the newcomers were single and had no family in Shanghai. Private rickshaw pullers were not included in these statistics. According to one estimate, there were about 15,000 private rickshaw pullers in Shanghai in the 1920s. See Li Cishan, Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang, 74; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 674. 39. Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 8 0 1 - 2 ; Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 29. 40. Zhu Bangxing, et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 674; Cai Binxian, "Cong nongcun pochan suo jichulai de renlichefu wenti"; Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu." 41. Cai Binxian, "Cong nongcun pochan suo jichulai de renlichefu wenti," 3 5 - 3 6 . An investigation of 1,350 rickshaw pullers in Nanjing found that 1 , 1 2 8 (83.55 percent) were formerly farmers. The most conservative estimate was that at least 70 percent of Chinese rickshaw pullers were peasant in origin (ibid.). 42. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 1 8 - 1 9 . 43. Guo Chongjie, "Shanghaishi de renliche wenti." 44. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 674. 45. Xi Wei, "Shanghai shehui de pouxi."

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351

46. Ibid. 47. The Chinese Labor Year Book (Peiping, 1928), cited in Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 797; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 675. 48. Shanghaishi nianjian, 1935: K 7 1 . 49. Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 800. The shifts in the 1920s were slightly different: the first (evening) shift was from 2 P.M. to 6 A.M. (16 hours) and the second (day) shift was from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M. (8 hours). Since the evening shift was double the hours of the day shift, it was often shared by two pullers. See Li Cishan, Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang, 72. 50. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 674. 51. Ibid., 675. 52. Ricksha Committee, "Report of Ricksha Committee," 66; Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1, no. 3 (1934): 39-41. 53. Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 3, 86; Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghai de gongzi tongji," 15, 3 4 - 3 5 . 54. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 29. 55. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 33 - 3 4 ; Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1, no. 3 (1934)138. 56. Hershatter, Workers of Tianjin, 66. 57. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Liu Hongsheng qiye shiliao, 1:219; Shanghaishi zonggonghui, KangRi zhanzheng shiqi Shanghai, 45. 58. 1-6, July 14, 1993. There were, however, unlucky days when, for instance, a puller was fined for a traffic violation. Police abuse of power by seizing rickshaw licenses was common. 59. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 62. 60. Ibid., 2 1 - 2 2 . 61. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian, 50, and tables 26, 27, 28. 62. Shanghaigang shihua bianxiezu, Shanghaigang shihua, 292-93; Chen Gang, Shanghaigang matou de bianqian, 38. 63. This could be interpreted as 1) a puller could not afford to buy more rice than a cap could hold, or 2) he might not have a container other than his cap, or 3) both. The same interpretations apply to the second sentence. 64. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 84. 65. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 676. 66. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 55. 67. Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1, no. 3 (1934): 41. 68. Zhu Maocheng, Diaocha Shanghai gongren, 3. 69. Shehui ribao, August 18,1936. 70. On the hiring of female workers in the textile industry, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers, chaps. 3 - 5 ; Xu Xinwu, Zhongguo jindai saosi gongyeshi, chapter 8. 71. Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 37, 317.

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80-84

72. Guohuo yuebao 1 , no. 6 (September 1924): 4. 73. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 82. 74. Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 228. 75. Gamewell, Gateway to China, 99. 76. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 82. 77. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 34, 55. 78. Wright, "Shanghai Imperialists," 92. 79. Philip Huang speaks of them as people who "straddled city and countryside, farming and urban work, rural and urban petty commodity production." Huang, Peasant Family, 334. 80. Pal, Shanghai Saga, -L6J. 8 1 . Shanghaitan, 4 : 1 7 2 ; Gamewell, Gateway to China, 93. 82. Gamewell, Gateway to China, 93. 83. Shanghaishi nianjian, 1 9 3 7 : 0 : 3 7 . This figure may not be considered lower than the average. Life expectancy in Shanghai in 1 9 5 1 was 42.0 years for males and 45.6 years for females (or an average of 43.8); see Hu Huanyong, Zhongguo renkou, 1 3 3 - 3 4 . Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian, 64, gives a slightly different average life expectancy in Shanghai in 1 9 5 1 : 44.6. Based on life expectancy in Nanjing in 1 9 3 5 , which was 38.50 years for males and 38.22 for females, Hu estimates that life expectancy in Republican Shanghai was likely lower than the 1 9 5 1 figures, probably around 40 years. 84. Pullers' Mutual Aid Association of Shanghai, Statistical Report, " A g e of Insured" and "Causes of Death and Deformity." 85. See chapter 3 for details on Shanghai's slums. 86. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 676. 87. Guo Chongjie, "Shanghaishi de renliche wenti," 27. 88. Johnstone, Shanghai Problem, 1 9 1 - 9 9 ; Z h u Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 6 7 3 - 7 4 . 89. Cai Binxian, "Cong nongcun pochan suo jichulai de renlichefu wenti." 90. The most informative reports based on these surveys are Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha"; Ricsha Committee, "Report of the Ricsha Committee"; Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu shenghuo zhuangkuang diaocha baogaoshu"; and Z h u Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong. 91. For example, most of the materials on rickshaw pullers that have been available to researchers were published in the mid-i930s, when rickshaw racketeers and pullers' lives became a headline issue in the city. The 1 9 3 9 investigation into pullers' lives was part of the underground activities of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai; see the introduction of the 1984 version of Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong. 92. This hypothesis was stimulated by m y spring 1989 interviews with two former rickshaw pullers in Shanghai. A relative of one of m y interviewees, Pan Pinglian, a sixty-one-year-old farmer from Gaoyou, Subei, was visiting his relatives in Shanghai. Knowing that I was interested in the life of rickshaw pullers, Pan commented: "I think Shanghainese were spoilt-—what in the hell

Notes to Pages 84-89

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353

was the big deal about pulling a rickshaw? It might be humiliating to serve others, but as far as the job itself was concerned, it was not a heavy one compared to what we peasants did on the farm back in the countryside." 93. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 4 8 - 4 9 . 94. Ibid., 5 5 - 5 6 . 95. Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 1 0 . 96. Shanghaitan, 4 : 1 7 2 . 97. Ibid., 1 7 5 ; Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang," 73 - 7 4 ; Xi Wei, "Shanghai shehui de pouxi," 70. 98. Li Cishan, Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang, 74. 99. Up until the early twentieth century, the "Chinese pheasant," or "ringed pheasant" (Phasianus torquatus), a favorite game bird, was plentiful in Shanghai. The Shanghai Sportsman's Calendar marked October 1 to December 1 as the season for pheasant shooting. Younger pheasants were sometimes sold in the markets as "Shandong chickens." See Dyce, Model Settlement, 112-18. 100. Xi Wei, "Shanghai shehui de pouxi," 7 0 - 7 1 ; Shanghaitan, 4 : 1 7 4 - 7 5 . 1 0 1 . Shanghaitan, 4 : 1 7 4 . 1 0 2 . Shanghaishi nianjian, 1 9 3 6 : M : 2 2 - 2 4 ; Shanghaishi nianjian, 1 9 3 7 : M : i 2 , U:83; Xi Wei, "Shanghai shehui de pouxi," 7 1 . 1 0 3 . Shanghaitan, 4:174-75. 104. Xi Wei, "Shanghai shehui de pouxi," 7 0 - 7 1 . 1 0 5 . Wang Delin, " G u Zhuxuan zai Zhabei faji he kaishe Tianchan Wutai," 357; Gu Shuping, " W o liyong Gu Zhuxuan de yanhu jinxing geming huodong," 360; Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 252. 106. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 7 4 75; Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 250; Zheng Yimei, Shanghai jiuhua, 1 8 . 1 0 7 . Yu Ling, Yu Ling juzuo xuan, 18; Zhonggong Shanghai Hualian, Shanghai Yong'an gongsi, 10; Luo Suwen, Shikumen: xunchang renjia, 67. 108. Lei Jingdun, "Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha," 1 3 , 44. 109. Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1 , no. 1 (1934): 1 0 7 . 1 1 0 . China Handbook Editorial Board, China Handbook 1950, 639. 1 1 1 . Lei Jingdun, Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha, 5 1 - 5 2 . 1 1 2 . In stories like this, the most dramatic ending had the protagonist becoming a zhuangyuan, or the Number One Scholar, who was then received in audience by the emperor. For an English translation of such stories, see Birch, Stories from a Ming Collection, especially 1 9 - 3 6 , 1 0 3 - 1 5 . 1 1 3 . In Subei, from which the majority of Shanghai's rickshaw pullers hailed, life was a constant struggle for survival. In such an environment, education was a great luxury; see Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity, 2 0 - 2 2 . 1 1 4 . Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1 , no. 1 (1934): 1 0 7 .

354

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Notes to Pages

89-91

1 1 5 . Or, as the sociologist Oscar Lewis phrased it, the "culture of poverty," a term first used by Lewis in the title of his famous book (1959). Lewis later elaborated on the notion in his other publications (1965 and 1968) and developed it into a highly controversial theory. 1 1 6 . Biweng, "Shanghai renlichefu"; Pal, Shanghai Saga, 1 7 0 . 1 1 7 . The membership fees were incorporated into the rents. Five cents was added to a twenty-four-hour rental. See North China Herald, June 27, 1934; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 680; Johnstone, Shanghai Problem, 194. 1 1 8 . Pullers' Mutual Aid Association of Shanghai, Annual Report, 4 - 5 . 1 1 9 . Ibid., 1 5 . 1 2 0 . Ibid., 4 - 5 and 1 5 . 1 2 1 . Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 678. 1 2 2 . Chen Da, VJoguo kangRi zhanzheng shiqi, 6 7 6 - 7 7 ; Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 232. Esteem for education can also be seen in the rickshaw men's neighborhoods, the shantytowns of Shanghai. Around 1 9 2 5 , five amateur sociologists explored a shantytown in northwest Shanghai, paying particular attention to education in the community. They visited three schools, all privately run, and observed some interesting and lively classroom scenes. One elementary school, which used standard textbooks issued by the Ministry of Education in Beiping (Beijing), had more than 30 students, who were "all lively and active." The observers noted that one of the schools practiced the Dalton system, which had been created only a few years earlier (in 1920) by Helen Huss Parkhurst (1887-?) in Dalton, Massachusetts. A t the time of the visit, the students were discussing with their teacher Confucian doctrine on the relation between self-cultivation and statecraft. "If one compares these schools with Shanghai's commercialized colleges," one of the visitors exclaimed, "one could say the former exhibit something of the genuine spirit of education." Wang Dunqing, "You Jiangbei zhimindi ji," 1 7 . On the Dalton system see Parkhurst, Education on the Dalton Plan; Dewey, Dalton Laboratory Plan; and Lynch, Rise. 1 2 3 . Xi Wei, "Shanghai shehui de pouxi"; Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 83. The expression "running like cows and horses" may not be as humiliating as the literal meaning suggests. The expression niu ma zou was customarily used as a formality in correspondence, along the lines of "Your servant" in an English letter in the Victorian era. The expression can be seen as early as the Han period in, for instance, Sima Qian's famous letter to Ren Shaoqin in Hanshu (The book of Han). 1 2 4 . Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1 , no. 1 (1934): 1 0 5 - 6 . 1 2 5 . Lei Jingdun, Shanghai Yangshupu renlichefu diaocha, 1 7 . 1 2 6 . Ibid., 49. 1 2 7 . Ibid., 5 0 - 5 1 . 1 2 8 . Hence the Chinese proverb Rensheng qishi gu lai xi (Since ancient times man has rarely lived to the age of seventy). This proverb may have

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355

sprung from a poem by the famous Tang poet Du Fu (712-770); see Changyong yanyu cidian, 34. 129. Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 284. 130. Shanghaishi nianjian, 1936: 0 : 5 0 - 5 1 . 1 3 1 . Yuan, Sidelights on Shanghai, 1 2 2 - 2 4 . 132. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 680. A similar measure was taken in the Chinese districts on February 2, 1935. Shanghaishi nianjian,

1936: 0:50-51.

133. Yuan, Sidelights on Shanghai, 125. 134. Thorbecke, Shanghai, 36; Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 1 1 ; Pal, Shanghai Saga, 167. 135. Gamewell, Gateway to China, 98-99. 136. Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 5 0 - 5 1 . 137. Dongfang ribao, December 2, 1939; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 683. 138. Rickshaws plied the streets of Shanghai for eighty-two years: from 1874, the year the first rickshaw appeared, to 1956, the year the last rickshaw was sent to the Shanghai Museum. 139. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai

chuzu qiche

renliche,

75-76140. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 652-53; Zhenhua, "Shanghai de matou xiaogong," 21; Chen Gang, Shanghaigang matou de bianqian, 27. 1 4 1 . Pal continues, "No wild guesses go into that statement[,] for the evidence was always all too plain for everybody to see in the streets of Shanghai any day of the week. It was a common sight to see a long line of wheelbarrow 'taxis' transporting as many as eight plump Chinese mill-girls—four on each side—to and from work morning and evening—and glad of the business" (Pal, Shanghai Saga, 167). This "common sight" was captured in historical photos, such as those collected in R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai; Tang Zhenchang, Jindai Shanghai fanhua lu, 249; and Wei, Old Shanghai, plate 3. 142. 1-6, July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 . This comment echoes Pan Pinglian's words cited in note 92. 143. Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale, 136. 144. Pal, Shanghai Saga, 1 7 0 - 7 1 . 145. Basler explained his research method as follows: Two kinds of running can be distinguished: (1) Relatively slow running with 100 double paces in one minute and with a length of (double) step up to 2 1 0 centimeters (7 feet). The foot is posed in the same manner as in walking. The sole touches the ground completely during a short time before pushing off with that foot. (2) The second kind of running, making a possible quicker locomotion, involves contact only between the toes and ball of the foot and the ground, but this kind of running can not be continued for any length of time.

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Notes to Pages 9 5 - 9 7

In the ricksha coolie there is a rolling motion of the foot, which is directly visible and demonstrable in photographs. It is characteristic of the first kind of running, and corresponds with the length of the step. In order to demonstrate this I marked off in a very busy street a measured distance, and f r o m a window situated not very far f r o m the street I counted the steps taken by ricksha coolies in covering this distance. This method has the advantage that the observed person is not aware of being observed and the length of step is that usually employed. Unlike laboratory experiments all movements are unconstrained and show no more than normal power.

Q u o t e d in Fang Fu-an, "Rickshaws in China," 8 0 6 - 8 . 146. Especially during the Cultural Revolution, pronouncements such as this appeared almost daily in Chinese newspapers. 147. Renli sanlun che hangye yange (The evolution of the rickshaw and pedicab trades), cited in Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 83. 148. W r i g h t , "Shanghai Imperialists," 92. 149. Shanghai's first tram line was opened in 1908, and its first bus line in 1922; see Shanghaishi gongyong shiye guanliju, Shanghai

gongyong

shiye,

334' 349150. Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao zhong zhi Shanghai, 1 5 . 1 5 1 . 1-6, March 19, 1989; I-22, July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 . 1 5 2 . Biweng, "Shanghai renlichefu." 1 5 3 . The "big license/small license" jargon was sometimes condemned as humiliating to the Chinese nation, since it suggested that the foreign (British) authorities were "greater" than the Chinese. See W a n g Dingjiu, Shanghai menjing, section "Xing de menjing," 1 8 - 1 9 ; Xiao Lingjun, Shanghai changshi, 58; Yiming, Shanghaishi, 55. 154. Li Cishan, Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang, 72; Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 75. 1 5 5 . Shanghaishi jiaotong y u n s h u ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 34; Yiming, Shanghaishi, 5 6 - 5 7 . 156. Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu," Shehui banyuekan 1 , no. 1 (1934): 1 0 3 1 5 7 . Z h u Bangxing, Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 677. Based on his own fieldwork in Shanghai in the 1940s, Chen Da ( 1 8 9 2 - 1 9 7 5 ) , a pioneer Chinese sociologist, mentioned that most rickshaw pullers had the habit of spending their leisure time in the teahouse; see Chen Da, Woguo kangRi zhanzheng shiqi, 676. 158. Shehui ribao, May 1 1 , 1 9 3 7 . See chapter 5 for details. 159. Shanghai Mercury, Shanghai by Night and Day, 8 6 - 8 7 . 160. Shanghaitan, 4 : 1 7 3 . 1 6 1 . An'nanjin was the Chinese pronunciation of " H e n n e q u i n . " The road was built in 1902 and initially named Taishan Road (Rue Tai Chan). In 1906 it was renamed after Hennequin, the vice chair of the Municipal Council of the French Concession. In 1946 the street was again renamed, this time as Dongtai Road. Dongtai is a county in Subei; t h u s the n a m e was somehow related to

Notes to Pages 9J-102

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357

the street's history as the "Great World of Jiangbei [Subei]." See Shanghaishi Luwanqu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 173. 162. The streets in Shanghai's foreign concessions (especially the French Concession) and the so-called extra-Settlement roads were often given Western names. The Chinese names for these streets were: "Ailaige Road" for Rue Soeur Allegre (which is today known as Taoyuan Road); "Dong zilaihuo jie" for Rue de Peres (today's Yongshou Road); "Xi zilaihuo jie" for Rue de Saigon (today's Guangxi'nan Road). Ningpo Road (today's Huaihaidong Road) was so named because the well-known Siming Gongsuo, the native-place association of Ningpo (Ningbo), and its cemetery were located there. See Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 3 7 1 , 383, Shanghaishi Luwanqu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 190; Ma Xuexin et al., Shanghai wenhua yuanliu, 216; Zheng Zuan, Shanghai diming xiaozhi, 1 2 1 , 1 2 3 . 163. Shehui ribao, February 20,1936, and March 1 4 , 1 9 3 6 . 164. Shehui ribao, September 1 2 , 1 9 3 4 . 165. Thorbecke, Shanghai, 36. 166. Krasno, Strangers Always, 1 0 9 - 1 0 . 167. Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity, 5 9 - 6 0 . 168. Xu Guozhen, Shanghai shenghuo, 21, 6 3 - 6 4 ; Wang Dingjiu, Shanghai menjing, section "Xing de menjing/' 19; 1-22, July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 . 169. Shanghaitan, 4 : 1 7 8 - 7 9 , 2 6 1 - 6 2 . 170. See Wang Dingjiu, Shanghai menjing, section "Xing de menjing," 2 0 - 2 2 . See also Xiao Lingjun, Shanghai changshi, 5 9 - 6 0 ; Xu Guozhen, Shanghai shenghuo, 64; Yiming, Shanghaishi, 56. 1 7 1 . Yiming, Shanghaishi, 56. 172. The Chinese Bund lay on the banks of the Huangpu River, outside the old walled city, to the south of the Bund in the International Settlement. It was a bustling place with various shops and markets extending from the east side of the Chinese city to the Huangpu River. Local people usually called it Shiliupu (lit., sixteen shops), the name of a major dock there. See Shanghai Mercury, Shanghai by Night and Day, 58. 173. Lu Fen, Shanghai shouzha, 28-29. Three dollars was exorbitant since the regular taxi fare at that time was one dollar to anywhere inside the city proper; rickshaw fares were normally less than half of taxi fares. See Ni Xiying, Shanghai, 4 3 , 1 4 2 - 4 3 . 174. Biweng, "Shanghai renlichefu," 60. 175. Pal, Shanghai Saga, 1 6 8 - 6 9 . 176. Ibid., 169. 177. Biweng, "Shanghai renlichefu," 6 0 - 6 1 ; Pal, Shanghai Saga, 169. 178. Gamewell, Gateway to China, 95; Darwent, Shanghai, xiv; Pal, Shanghai Saga, 168. 179. Darwent, Shanghai, xiv. 180. Pal, Shanghai Saga, 168. 1 8 1 . Biweng, "Shanghai renlichefu," 64. 182. Pal, Shanghai Saga, 1 6 9 - 7 0 .

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Notes to Pages

102-114

183. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 675. 184. Shenbao, December 3 1 , 1 8 7 4 . 185. Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 86; Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 22711. 186. Wenhui bao, October 1 , 1 9 4 6 , October 4,1946, and October 1 8 , 1 9 4 6 . The Spanish seaman was sentenced to one year and three months in jail and the American sailor was judged by the American military court in Shanghai to have acted in "self-defense" and so was declared innocent. See Shanghaishi chuzu qiche gongsi, Shanghai chuzu qiche renliche, 1 0 9 - 1 0 ; and Tang Hai, Zang Dayaozi zhuan, 50. 187. Officially, Shanghai's foreign concessions ended in 1943, but many of the privileges enjoyed by Westerners continued until the Communist takeover in May 1949. Zang was born in 1903; he came to Shanghai and started to pull a rickshaw at age thirteen; see Wenhui bao, October 4,1946. For a complete biography of Zang, see Tang Hai, Zang Dayaozi zhuan. 188. Biweng, "Shanghai renlichefu," 60. The translation is in Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicities, 60, cited here with some modifications. 189. Ibid. 190. I-21, August 1 1 , 1 9 9 5 ; I-22, August 3 , 1 9 9 5 . 1 9 1 . Krasno, Strangers Always, 109. C H A P T E R 3 . E S C A P I N G THE S H A N T Y T O W N

1 . Hence G. E. Miller's well-known and multitranslated book, Shanghai, the Paradise of Adventurers. 2. Barber, Fall of Shanghai, 17. 3. Honig, Sisters and Strangers, 23. 4. Shanghaishi Nanshi quzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghaishi Nanshi quzhi, 8 9 1 - 9 1 4 . 5. The cultural value of this architecture in Shanghai is, to varying degrees, recognized by today's Chinese government, and certain measures have been taken for preservation and protection. By 1991, six sites in Shanghai were ranked by the authorities as "Nationally Registered Key Cultural Relics for Protection," fifty-two were ranked as "Municipally Registered Key Cultural Relics for Protection," and eighty-two were ranked as "District Registered Key Cultural Relics for Protection." At a time when the urban structure of Shanghai is undergoing large-scale radical changes, the architecture categorized in these hierarchies may not be demolished for any purpose. Wang Shaozhou, Shanghai jindai chengshi jianzhu, 23. Zhang Baogao and Fan Nengchuan, Shanghai luyou wenhua, 347. 6. The term yangfang can be used to refer to any Western-style architecture, including office buildings, but customarily it referred mainly to residential detached houses. 7. Details of shikumen appear in chapter 4. 8. Until very recently this area was still viewed by the people of Shanghai

Notes to Pages 115-117

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359

as an undesirable rural backwater. By the late 1980s, when mounting pressure on housing had become a most serious social problem in Shanghai, an old folk saying remained valid: " A single room in Puxi [west of the Huangpu River] is better than a whole apartment in Pudong" (ningyao Puxi yijianfang, buyao Pudong yitaofang). 9. See "Report of the Housing Committee, 1936 - 3 7 " ; Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living, 1 3 5 - 4 0 ; Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, xia: 3 - 7 . Wang Shaozhou, Shanghai jindai chengshi jianzhu, 7 3 - 1 9 6 ; Chen Congzhou and Zhang Ming, Shanghai jindai jianzhu shigao, 1 6 0 - 7 0 . 10. I-32. 1 1 . Regarding inner-city slums in twentieth-century America, see Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; and Ward, Poverty. In terms of the location of its shantytowns, Shanghai was more like Asian cities such as Calcutta than Latin American cities such as Mexico City. Recent research in the field of urban poverty has corrected the notion that in developing countries the urban poor tend to live on the outskirts of the city. In Mexico, for example, new migrants from the countryside prefer to live as renters in the inner city. The urban peripheral "shantytowns" are inhabited mostly by low-income families who own the property on which they live. In other words, the urban periphery consists of neighborhoods relatively better than the cheap rental accommodations in the central city. An "archipelago" model is more descriptive of the slums there. See Gilbert and Varley, Landlord and Tenant, 98-99; Sernau, Economies of Exclusion, 99-100. 12. Zhang Jiaqi and Ban Zhiwen, "Shanghaishi penghuqu gaikuang diaocha baogao," 235. 1 3 . Mengyi, "Shanghai de yijiao." Of course, economic status often serves as a decisive measure for the social acceptance of newcomers. Speaking of nineteenth-century Hankou (Hankow), William Rowe notes that people tended to look on merchants as legitimate sojourners but discriminated against "vagrants" (youmin, many of whom were shack dwellers) as unwanted outsiders. See Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community, 298-99. 14. For a detailed discussion of the definition of the homeless, see Peroff, "Who Are the Homeless?" 15. Namely, the International Settlement Shanghai Municipal Police, the French Concession Police, the Nationalist Garrison Command's Military Police, and the Chinese Special Municipality's Public Safety Bureau. See Wakeman, "Policing Modern Shanghai." 16. Xinwen bao (Daily news) (Shanghai), January 26,1932. Here the term "street beggars" referred to those who did not have a regular shelter (or "home") in Shanghai. It was estimated that Shanghai's professional beggars at that time numbered about 20,000. 17. Peroff, "Who Are the Homeless?" 34. 18. Charles Hoch, "Brief History." 19. In China up to the early 1990s, people still referred to getting an urban job as "upward transformation" (shangdiao), and to going to the countryside

360

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Notes to Pages

117-122

to work as "downward exile" (xiafang) (I-33). O n "rural send-downs" in China with a particular focus on the case of Shanghai, see White, Policies of Chaos, passim. 20. Normally, for these people the homes, however humble, they had left in their villages were better t h a n the shanties of Shanghai. O n China's rural housing, see Knapp, China's Traditional Rural Architecture, 1 0 8 - 2 1 ; China's Vernacular Architecture; and Chinese House, 5 - 4 9 . 2 1 . A f t e r 1 9 5 5 the C o m m u n i s t government pursued an extremely strict household registration (hukou) system that successfully prevented rural residents f r o m entering the cities. Although this system contributed to the gradual disappearance of squatter areas in Shanghai, the lure of Shanghai was not diminished. In China's present reform, for the first time in half a century, a huge n u m b e r of rural residents are entering Shanghai in search of a better life. By the early 1990s, the so-called floating population exceeded 1 million and, like their predecessors some fifty years earlier, m a n y of t h e m stay illegally in those areas that lie between Shanghai proper and its suburbs. See Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai liuiong renkou, 3 9 - 5 7 ; World Journal, April 2 9 , 1 9 9 2 . O n the h u k o u system see also Tiejun Chen and M a r k Selden, "Origins and Social Consequences," and H a r r y Xiaoying W u , "Rural to Urban Migration." 22. Shenbao, September 2 4 , 1 8 7 2 . Jiangnan, Jiangnan zaochuan changshi, 27-30. 23. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 3. 24. Z h a n g Zhongli, Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu, 5 3 - 5 9 , 7 1 2 - 5 2 . 25. Cheng Shi, "Yaoshuilong de gushi," 2 - 3 . 26. Z h u Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 91; Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 9. 27. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 1 1 . 28. I-7, a f o r m e r resident of Fangualong. 29. T h e t e r m penghu can also refer to the straw-hut occupants themselves, although these occupants were m o r e c o m m o n l y called penghu jumin rather t h a n penghu. In Shanghai, " p e n g h u " is an official t e r m referring to straw h u t s or mat sheds. For a classification of housing types in Shanghai see Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai tongji nianjian, 1988, 438, 441. 30. I - i , a f o r m e r resident of Yaoshuilong. 3 1 . Z h a n g Jiaqi and Ban Zhiwen, "Shanghai p e n g h u q u , " 237. 32. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 1 2 . 33. Lamson, "Problem," 1 4 7 - 4 8 . 34. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 10-11. 35. Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, xia: 6. 36. 1-6, a f o r m e r resident of Yaoshuilong. 37. Shanghai's population, taken in triennial censuses, was 2,641,220 in 1927, 3,144,805 in 1930, 3,404,435 in 1933, and 3 , 8 1 4 , 3 1 5 in 1936. Zou Yiren, ]iu Shanghai renkou, 90. 38. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 1 3 .

Notes to Pages 122-128

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361

39. Shibao, November 19, 1914; Kuai Shixun, Shanghai gonggong zujie, 488-89. 40. Zheng Zuan, "Jindai Zhabei de xingshuai," 418. 41. Chen Gongpu, Paohuo xia de Shanghai, 1 7 0 - 8 7 . 42. Lamson, "Problem," 147. 43. Zhu Maocheng, Diaocha Shanghai gongren, 8. 44. Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 138. Another report of 1936 indicated that average annual rent for sufficient land to erect a straw hut was $10, and $ 5 - 6 for land in a less desirable location; see Shehui ribao, July 1 7 , 1 9 3 6 . 45. Ibid. See also Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 91. 46. Zhu Maocheng, Diaocha Shanghai gongren, 7 - 8 . 47. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 23-28. 48. Lieu, Growth, 172. 49. Benshu bianxiezu, Zhaojiabang, 3. 50. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 17. 51. Ibid., 1 6 - 1 8 . 52. See Lu, "Creating Urban Outcasts," figs. 1 - 1 0 . 53. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 7 5 80.1-i; I-5; 1-6, March 19,1989. 54. Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, xia: 6. 55. Chen Gang, Shanghaigang matou de bianqian, 3 9 - 4 1 . 56. Zhu Maocheng, Diaocha Shanghai gongren, 7. 57. Zhang Jiaqi and Ban Zhiwen, Shanghaishi penghuqu, 236. See also Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, xia: 6 - 7 . 58. See Lu, "Creating Urban Outcasts," map on p. 567. 59. Xue Yongli, "Jiu Shanghai penghuqu de xingcheng." The following table shows the number of the straw-hut slums in Shanghai in the early 1950s (adapted from Shanghai penghuqu, 7): Households per Slum over 2,000 1,001-2,000 501-1,000 301-500 200-300

Number of Slums 4 39 36 150 93

60. Ibid. In March 1949, two months before the Communists took over the city, Shanghai's population was 5,455,007. See Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 91. 61. Bandyopadhyay, "Inheritors." 62. Zhou Erfu, Morning in Shanghai, 28. 63. Honig, Sisters and Strangers, 79-93. 64. I-4.

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Notes to Pages

129-132

65. Dongping, "Pinminku fangwen ji." 66. Official statistics in 1936 show that there were 226,718 factory workers in Shanghai at that time, of which 136,665 (60 percent) were women and 27,091 (12 percent) were children. Most of the child workers were between the ages of 1 2 and 14. There were also a considerable number of child workers who were under 1 2 years of age; the youngest were only 6 or 7 years old. Feng Ruogu, "Shanghai tonggong niigong zhi shenghuo gaikuang." 67. Cheng Shi, "Yaoshuilong de gushi." 68. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 5. 69. Honig, "Invisible Inequalities," and Creating Chinese Ethnicity, 52. 70. I-5, resident of Yaoshuilong, 1 9 4 1 - 8 3 . 71. Shehui ribao, July 1 7 , 1 9 3 6 . 72. Currently available Shanghai population statistics indicating native place specify only the province. Shanghai's native-place associations (tongxianghui) left about fifteen hundred volumes of documents dated from 1 9 1 2 to 1959, which are now available in the Shanghai Municipal Archives. However, data on residents' origin below the provincial level (i.e., county or prefecture) is still extremely fragmentary. In any case, no matter where they came from, shantytown dwellers were generally ignored by these associations. Native-place associations were in many ways dominated by the middle and upper classes, and issues related to shantytown dwellers were usually not on their agenda. This is another illustration of the "outcast" status of shantytown squatters. On Shanghai's native-place associations, see Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation. 73. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 9 0 - 9 1 . 74. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 9-10. 75. The results of this survey are published in Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo chengdu de yige yanjiu. 76. The results of this survey are published in Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers. 77. The bungalow-type, single-story row house is very common in Pudong (the area east of the Huangpu River) and other suburbs of Shanghai. Although structurally similar to the alleyway house—i.e., both have brick walls and tiled roofs—they are decidedly inferior in construction; these houses could not bear the weight of a second story. Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo, 71-72. 78. An official survey of working hours and income of Shanghai's workers in 1 9 3 0 - 3 4 shows that among the sixteen industries surveyed, cottonspinning workers had the longest working hours and ranked fifteenth in pay. Bureau of Social Affairs, Wage Rates in Shanghai, 60. 79. Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living, 60. 80. Lamson, "Problem," 148. 81. Zhang Jingyu, Shehui diaocha: Shenjiahang shikuang, 5 9 - 6 1 ; Lamson, "Effect."

Notes to Pages 132-137

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363

82. Luo Zhiru, Tongjibiao zhong zhi Shanghai, 86. 83. Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living, 14. 84. Shanghaishi nianjian, 1947: C:iy-Ci9; Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai penghuqu, 6 4 - 6 5 . 85. Ibid., 65. 86. Ibid., 15. 87. Ibid., 9 - 1 0 . 88. Ibid., 64-66. 89. Dongping, "Pinminku fangwen ji." 90. Shanghai tebieshi shehuiju, Shanghai zhi gongye. 91. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Rongjia qiye

shiliao,

1=33792. See Honig, Sisters and Strangers, especially chapter 5, for details. 93. Shanghai tebieshi shehuiju, Shanghai zhi gongye, table 1 3 . 94. Xu Weiyong and Huang Hanmin, Rongjia qiye fazhan shi, 276. 95. Shanghaishi fangzhi gongyeju et al., Yong'an fangzhi yinran gongsi, 232. 96. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Rongjia qiye shiliao, 2:314. 97. Hengfeng, Ranchang jinxi, 5, 7 - 8 . 98. Chinese Economic Journal 8, no. 2 : 1 0 6 - 1 2 ; Shanghaishi liangshiju, Zhongguo jindai mianfen gongye shi, 314; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, 622. 99. Shanghaishi liangshiju, Zhongguo jindai mianfen gongye shi, 3 3 1 . 100. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Rongjia qiye shiliao, 1:125. 101. Shehui ribao, July 1 7 , 1 9 3 6 . 102. Ibid., 8. 103. Pedicabs were introduced in 1942, partly as a result of the gasoline shortage during the war. They gradually replaced rickshaws and became one of the main forms of transportation within the inner city of Shanghai after 1945. Under a government program, rickshaws, which were increasingly considered "inhuman and unscientific" by the public after World War II, were to be eliminated step by step and replaced by pedicabs. Many rickshaw pullers became pedicab drivers, although rickshaws were not officially abolished until 1956. Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, zhong: 34; Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, Shanghai penghuqu, 6y. 104. Shanghaishi renmin zhengfu bangongting, Shanghai shizheng gongzuo qingkuang tongjitu, 28. 105. Jiang Siyi and Wu Yuanshu, Shanghai qibai ge qigai de shehui diaocha, 2 6 - 3 3 . 106. Darwent, Shanghai, 84; Shanghai Municipal Council Report for the Year 1932 and Budget for the Year 1933, 2 1 1 ; Peters, Shanghai Policeman, 241. 107. Zhang Jiaqi and Ban Zhiwen, "Shanghaishi penghuqu gaikuang diaocha baogao," 235.

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Notes

to Pages

137—141

1 0 8 . For a view of these signs, see Pan, Shanghai, 56; Tang Zhenchang, Jindai Shanghai fanhua lu, 75, 234. 1 0 9 . Bureau of Social A f f a i r s , Standard of Living, 1 0 4 ; Yang X i m e n g , Shanghai gongren shenghuo chengdu, 3 5 . 1 1 0 . " R e p o r t of the Housing Committee," 1 0 1 . 1 1 1 . Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 4 8 - 4 9 ; Wang Yingxia, Wang Yingxia zizhuan, 70; Shanghaishi Jing'anqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 2 1 4 . CHAPTER 4 . THE H O M E S OF THE LITTLE U R B A N I T E S 1 . This neglect of the lilong at the popular level has also been reflected in the scholarly literature. Given the importance of this type of house in the development of Shanghai and its significance in the everyday life of the city's people, it is remarkable how little it has been studied. This neglect has been partly corrected by some recent academic research in China, notably the works of Luo S u w e n and Z h a n g Jishun, which treat the shikumen as a legitimate topic for historical research and associate the topic with the broader urban culture of Shanghai (See Luo Suwen, Shikumen: xunchang renjia; Z h a n g Jishun, " L u n Shanghai lilong"). Although still not part of mainstream historiography, this work is part of the v e r y recent trend in the People's Republic to reverse the four decades of neglect of social history. None of this recent work, however, rises above generalities, nor does any of it focus on the structure of everyday life in shikumen neighborhoods. In the English-speaking world, Jeffrey W. Cody has an ongoing research project related to this subject. See his "Residential Real Estate in Republican Shanghai," a paper presented at the international conference on Shanghai at the Shanghai A c a d e m y of Social Sciences, Shanghai, A u gust 1 7 - 1 9 , 1 9 9 3 . 2. Kuai Shixun, Shanghai gonggong Shanghai xiaodaohui qiyi shi, 249.

zujie

shigao,

347; G u o Y u m i n g ,

3. Lang, Shanghai, Considered Socially, 27; Kuai Shixun, Shanghai gonggong zujie shigao, 359. 4. Z o u Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 3 - 4 , 9 0 - 9 1 . 5. De Jesus, Historical Shanghai, 98-99. 6. Z h u Jiancheng, "Jiu Shanghai fangdichan de xingqi," 1 1 ; Wang Shaozhou, Shanghai jindai chengshi jianzhu, 75; Kuai Shixun, Shanghai gonggong zujie shigao, 347. 7. Spencer, " H o u s e of the Chinese"; Knapp, Chinese House, 5 - 2 5 . 8. Hu Jianhua, "Songdai chengshi fangdichan guanli j i a n l u n , " 2 9 - 3 0 . 9. Z h u Jiancheng, "Jiu Shanghai fangdichan de xingqi," 1 0 . 1 0 . Alcock, Capital of the Tycoon, 3 7 . 1 1 . Ge Yuanxi, Huyou zaji, 1 4 . 1 2 . Shen Bojing and Chen Huaipu, Shanghaishi zhinan, 1 3 . 1 3 . Z h a n g Zhongli and Chen Zengnian, Shaxun

34-35-

jituan

zai jiu

Zhongguo,

Notes to Pages 141-14$

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365

1 4 . Shen Chenxian, "Nanjing lu fangdichan de lishi." 1 5 . Zhu Jiancheng, "Jiu Shanghai fangdichan de xingqi," 1 5 . 1 6 . Ibid., 1 4 . 1 7 . The following is a list of some top Chinese real estate magnates in Shanghai, all of whom were compradors for Western companies in Shanghai (See Z h u Jiancheng, "Jiu Shanghai de Huaji fangdichan dayezhu"): Cheng Jinxuan Zhou Liantang Bei Runsheng Y u Qiaqing Z h u Dachun Chen Binxian Ying Zhiyun Wei Tingrong Z h u Ziyao

Comprador of Sassoon and Co. Comprador of Sassoon and Co. Comprador, a "pigment magnate" Comprador of the Dutch Bank Comprador of Jardine Matheson and Co. (Yihe) Comprador of Burkill and Sons (Xiangmo) Comprador of Tonghe Comprador of the French Bank Comprador of Banque de L'lndo-chine (Tongfang huili Bank)

1 8 . For the convenience of narration, the "Nanking Road area" refers to the British Settlement in its early stage. It centered on Nanking Road and was bounded by the Bund on the east, Tibet Road on the west, the southern bank of Suzhou Creek on the north, and Yangjingbang Creek (later transformed into Avenue Edward VII) on the south. The boundaries of this, the core area of modern Shanghai, were set by the Shanghai Daotai, Lin Gui, and the British consul Rutherford Alcock in November 1848. 1 9 . Shen Chenxian, "Nanjing lu fangdichan de lishi" and "Shanghai zaoqi de jige waiguo fangdichan shang." 20. Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai tongji nianjian, 438. 2 1 . Ibid., 438; Shanghai zhuzhai, Shanghai zhuzhai (1949-1990), 147. 22. The terms lilong and longtang have exactly the same meaning, but there is a slight difference in usage. Lilong is used on both formal and informal occasions, while longtang is more or less slang. For instance, in post-1949 Shanghai, one of the basic neighborhood organizations based essentially on divisions of alleyway houses was called "lilong residents' committees" not "longtang residents' committees." 23. Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 1 3 6 . The framework was made of marble or the local red stone produced in Ningbo. Later, in order to reduce costs, these materials were often replaced by bricks. But the term shikumen was still popularly used; the name was not thought to fall short of reality, because the word shi (stone) in the Shanghai dialect is commonly used to refer to cement and brick. 24. Luo, Shikumen, 18. 25. Shenbao, September 2 7 , 1 8 7 2 . 26. Bird, Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 1 5 , 1 9 . 27. For instance, the dragon and the phoenix were symbols of the emperor and the empress respectively, but a wedding of ordinary people was (and still

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145-152

is) commonly described by others in complimentary terms as a joining of dragon and phoenix (I-10, March 26,1989; I-22, August 3,1995). 28. Zhang Jishun, "Lun Shanghai lilong." 29. For instance, Wagner wrote, "In Shanghai the two-story li or alleyway house is the typical housing unit" (Labor Legislation in China, 50). 30. Shi Songjiu, Shanghaishi luming daquan, 4 0 1 - 6 7 3 . 3 1 . Zheng Zuan, Shanghai diming xiaozhi, 73 -74. 32. Shi Songjiu, Shanghaishi luming daquan, 5 4 0 - 4 1 . 33. See ibid., 4 0 1 - 6 7 3 , table of the Names of Alleyway-House Compounds in the City Proper of Shanghai, passim. 34. This is evident in the correspondence of many well-known figures who resided in Shanghai, including Mao Zedong. In a letter dated 1920, Mao told his friend that his address in Shanghai was "Hatong Road, Minhounan Li, number 29." (The letter is preserved in the CCP's First National Congress museum.) In the 1950s, all residential compounds were given a street number. 35. Blaser, Courtyard House in China, 5 - 1 4 ; Knapp, Chinese House, 11-13. 36. Shanghai zhi zui bianweihui, Shanghai zhi zui, 1 3 3 . 37. Gao Chao, "Shanghai lilongzhuzhai yan'ge," 225-26; Jia You, "Shanghai longtang mian mian guan," 286-87. 38. Wang Shaozhou, Shanghai jindai chengshi jianzhu, 81. 39. Chen Congzhou and Zhang Ming, Shanghai jindai jianzhu shigao, 163. 40. Wang Shaozhou and Chen Zhimin, Lilong jianzhu, 59-60; Chen Congzhou and Zhang Ming, Shanghai jindai jianzhu shigao, 163. 41. Wang Shaozhou, Shanghai jindai chengshi jianzhu, 77; Chen Congzhou and Zhang Ming, Shanghai jindai jianzhu shigao, 1 6 0 - 6 5 . 42. Shanghaishi fangchan guanliju, Shanghai lilong minju, 26. 43. Wang Shaozhou, Shanghai jindai chengshi jianzhu, 8 1 - 8 3 . F ° r twenty detailed samples of these new-style alleyway-house compounds, see Shanghaishi fangchan guanliju, Shanghai lilong minju, 9 7 - 1 4 5 . 44. Zhang Zhongli, jindai Shanghai chengshi, 5 3 - 5 9 , 7 1 2 - 5 2 . 45. Lanning and Couling, 2:26. 46. Wang Shaozhou and Chen Zhimin, Lilong jianzhu, 6 - 8 . 47. Luo Suwen, Shikumen, 1 7 . 48. In the less than seventy years from 1865 to 1933, the average land value in the International Settlement had increased twenty-six times, from 1 , 3 1 8 taels per mu to 33,877 taels per mu (1 acre = 6 mu). See Zhang Zhongli and Chen Zengnian, Shaxun jituan zai jiu Zhongguo, 3 5 - 3 6 . 49. Luo Suwen, Shikumen, 21. 50. Shanghaishi Jing'anqu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 93; Luo Suwen, Shikumen, 21. This alleyway-house compound is still densely populated. It is located to the west of Lane 566 in Xinzha Road, Jing'an District. 5 1 . Shanghaishi fangchan guanliju, Shanghai lilong minju, 26. I-28, August 7,1995.

Notes to Pages 153-164

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52. "Report of the Housing Committee," 99. 53. The present-day address of Jianye Li is "Lanes 440,456, and 496 of Jianguoxi Road." The following description of Jianye Li is based on the author's field study conducted in July 1993. For more information on Jianye Li, see Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu, Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu dimingzhi, 32, and 1 9 1 ; Shanghaishi fangchan guanliju, Shanghai lilong minju, 8 4 - 8 5 . 54. The floor plan described above is the original design. Virtually all houses in Jianye Li had undergone some sort of remodeling to accommodate more rooms and tenants, as I will discuss below. 55. See Yu Shan, "Er fangdong yu dingfei yazu." 56. Ibid. 57. "Report of the Housing Committee, 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 3 7 , " 99-100. My interpolations (in brackets) are added to indicate the standard local terms for the rooms and tenants. 58. Zhang Zhongli and Chen Zengnian, Shaxun jituan zai jiu Zhongguo, 45. 59. "Report of the Housing Committee, 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 3 7 , " 98. 60. Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghai ren, 29. 61. Cao Maotang and Wu Lun, Shanghai yingtan huajiu, 206-9. 62. Chen Yanlin, Shanghai dichan daquan, 337. 63. Kotenev, Shanghai: Its Mixed Court, 468. 64. Bao Tianxiao, Chuanyinglou huiyilu, 3 1 5 - 1 6 . 65. Jia You, "Shanghai longtang mian mian guan," 102; Xia Lingen, Jiu Shanghai sanbai liushi hang, 166. 66. Shanghaishi liangshiju et al., Zhongguo jindai mianfen gongye shi, 323-24. 67. Xu Run, Xu Yuzhai zixu nianpu, 234. 68. Although geographically Nanjing is located south of the Yangzi River, by custom people of Nanjing origin were often regarded as "half-Subei" people. This may be partly because the Nanjing dialect is sufficiently different from major Jiangnan dialects such as the Suzhou dialect and close to Subei dialects. 69. Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity, 4 4 - 4 5 . 70. I-21, July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 ; I-25, July 16, 1993; I-26, August 6,1993. 71. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian, 90. 72. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 2 1 1 - 2 3 . 73. Liu Fengsheng, "Buke siyi de Shanghai yi shi zhu." 74. Wang Weizu, Shanghaishi fangzu zhi yanjiu; Yu Shan, "Er fangdong yu dingfei yazu"; Luo Suwen, Shikumen, 3 0 - 3 1 . 75. Hua Zi, "Erfangdong zhi xinji"; Yu Shan, "Er fangdong yu dingfei yazu"; Du Li, "'Termites' and the Second-Landlords." 76. In January 1930, the name was officially changed to "permanent rental contract" (yong zu qi), but the term daoqi continued in use until 1949. See Zhang Xiaobo, "Shanghai daoqi kao," 9 8 - 1 0 0 .

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164-1/2

77. Ye Shumei, "Shanghai zujie de fangdichan maimai zhidu." 78. Jin Xuan, "Shanghai fangdichan chanquan pingzheng pouxi," 34; Ye Shumei, "Shanghai zujie de fangdichan maimai zhidu," 180. 79. Du Li, " ' B a i m a y i ' y u erfangdong," 276. 80. Wang Weizu, Shanghaishi fangzu zhi yanjiu, 50392. 8 1 . Ye Shumei, "Shanghai zujie de fangdichan maimai zhidu," 180. 82. Chen Yanlin, Shanghai dichan daquan, 3 2 7 - 2 9 . 83. Shanghai jiqiye, Shanghai jiqiye gongren yundong shi, 5 6 - 5 7 . 84. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai Yong'an gongsi, 1 9 0 - 9 1 . 85. Su Zi, "Shanghai ren," 1 7 . 86. Hua Zi, "Erfangdong zhi xinji." 87. Shenbao, March 8 , 1 9 4 8 . 88. Wang Weizu, Shanghaishi fangzu zhi yanjiu, 5 0 3 9 1 . 89. I-10, March 2 0 , 1 9 8 9 ; I - 2 1 , July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 . 90. Examples of class labeling and political campaigns in the PRC can be found in White, Policies of Chaos, 1 0 - 1 5 , an< ^ passim, on the situations in Shanghai. 91. Xia Yan, Shanghai wuyan xia, 88. 92. Ibid.; Biweng, "Shanghai wuyanxia jiantao." 93. About 43 square feet (4 square meters) per person was approximately the average dwelling space for the people of Shanghai in the late 1940s. Up to 1990, this ratio was still a cutoff figure for the allocation of houses in Shanghai. Families with floor space below that figure were classified as "households in difficulty" (kunnan hu). See Shanghaishi zhufang zhidu, Shanghai zhufang zhidu gaige, 7 5 - 7 6 . 94. Xiangyu, "Gelou shijing." 95. Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo, ji-jy, Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 5 4 - 5 6 ; Z h u Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, passim. 96. Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye, passim. 97. Duojiugong, "Shanghai tingzijian jiepou tu." 98. Si Ying, "Tingzijian de shenghuo." 99. Wang Guanquan, Huainian Xiao Hong, 63. 100. Zhang Qing, Tingzijian, 5. 1 0 1 . Lu Xun entitled the three collections Qiejieting zawen (Essays from the Qiejie pavilion), Qiejieting zawen erji (Essays from the Qiejie pavilion, volume 2), and Qiejieting zawen mobian (Final essays from the Qiejie pavilion). The expression Qiejieting is a pun. The first character, qie, forms half of the character zu. The second character, jie, forms half of a different character also read jie. This latter character (jie) combined with the character zu, forms the word zujie, meaning "foreign concession." Ting implies a pavilion room. Hence, Qiejieting cleverly suggests "a pavilion room in the semiconcession." W h y Lu Xun chose this name had to do with where his home was situated. His residence, Number 9 Dalu Xincun (where he lived from April 1 9 3 3 to his

Notes to Pages 173 - 1 7 6

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death in October 1936), was located in Hongkou, at the boundary between the International Settlement and the Chinese district. It was here that some of the controversial "extra-Settlement roads," discussed in chapter 1 , had been built. As noted, sovereignty over the areas covered by these roads was ambiguous. Hence, these areas could be called a "semiconcession." The three collections of essays are found in volume 6 of Lu Xun quanji. 102. Cited from Zhang Qing, Tingzijian, 3. 103. See chapter 6 for details. 104. Shehui ribao, October 1 , 1 9 3 4 . 105. I-20; I-25, July 29, 1995. See also Jia You, "Shanghai longtang mian mian guan." 106. Shen Deci et al., "Huiyi Datong Daxue," 138. 107. Ou Yuanhui, "Daxia Daxue xiaoshi jiyao," 1 4 3 - 4 4 , 1 5 2 108. Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu, 3 :i96. 109. The bookstores (shuju) referred to here were primarily printing houses, but they often had a retail salesroom. 1 1 0 . Shanghaishi Huangpu quzhi, Huangpu quzhi, 1245. 1 1 1 . Today's address is Lane 1881 of North Sichuan Road. Neishan, the name of the bookstore, is the Chinese pronunciation of the characters for "Uchiyama." 1 1 2 . Yu Dafu, Yu Dafu wenji, 4 : 2 2 1 . 1 1 3 . In 1929, the bookstore was moved to Number 1 1 Scotte Road (today's Shanyin Road), where it remained until 1949. It was estimated that Lu Xun, whose residence was within a few minutes' walking distance from the bookstore, visited the store more than five hundred times in his later years, usually in the afternoon, and purchased at least a thousand books there. His friendship with Uchiyama allowed him to use the bookstore as a mailing address, for meeting friends, and, at a time when Lu Xun was on the government's blacklist, for refuge. (Lu Xun actually lived on the second floor of the store for a month, from March 19 to April 19, 1930, when a secret warrant for his arrest was issued by the Nationalist government.) Lu Xun's exalted reputation in the PRC led to the bookstore's site being listed as a municipal registered relic on August 26,1980; and on September 2 8 , 1 9 8 1 , as part of the celebration of the centenary of Lu Xun's birthday, a stone tablet was erected on the site (now a branch of the People's Bank). See Uchiyama, "Rojin sense"; Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, 5:166-82; Shanghaishi Hongkouqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 368-69. 1 1 4 . Zhu Lianbao, Jinxiandai Shanghai chubanye yinxiang ji, 2 and passim. 1 1 5 . Yang Hao and Ye Lan, Jiu Shanghai fengyun renwu, 1 1 1 - 1 2 . Fanhua bao published a number of novels and other works of fiction that are among the important works of twentieth-century Chinese literature, such as Li Boyuan's Guanchang xianxing ji (Records of current officialdom), Wu Yuanren's Hutu shijie (A muddled world), and Liu E's Laocan youji (The travel notes of Laocan).

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1 1 6 . Zhu Lianbao, Jinxiandai Shanghai chubanye, 339. 1 1 7 . Liangyou, no. 100 (December 1934). 1 1 8 . Shanghai Municipal Police File, D-627. 1 1 9 . Wu Guifang, "Jindai Shanghai geming yiji gaishu," 1 8 - 1 9 ; Gu Yanpei, "Shanghai Shudian jiuzhi"; Shanghaishi Changningqu, Shanghaishi Changningqu dimingzhi, 1 2 5 , 1 7 0 . 120. Zhang Qing, "Zhongguo gongchandang"; Shanghaishi Luwanqu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 2 1 5 - 1 6 ; Wu Guifang, Shanghai fengwu zhi, 1 1 3 - 1 7 . 1 2 1 . Ibid. 1 2 2 . Shanghai yange bianxiezu, Shanghai de geming yiji, 7; Shanghaishi Jing'anqu, Shanghaishi

Jing'anqu

dimingzhi,

195; Zheng Chaolin, Huaijiu

ji,

94-951 2 3 . Yu Jinghai, "Xin qingnian bianjibu jiuzhi"; Wu Guifang, "Jindai Shanghai," 1 1 - 1 2 . 124. Wang Meidi, "Zhongguo zuizao"; Shanghaishi Luwanqu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 146. 1 2 5 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 221. The present-day address of Furun Li is 270 Guizhou Road. 126. Ibid., 250. The present-day address of Baxian Fang is 109 Ninghaixi Road. 1 2 7 . The present-day address of Qingyuan Li is 288 Beijingdong Road; and of Ruyi Li, 575 Henanzhong Road. 128. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 207, 210. 129. Ibid., 2 0 4 - 5 . The present-day address of Xingren Li is 1 2 0 Ningbo Road. 1 3 0 . Zhang Hong, Shili yangchang, 55. 1 3 1 . Hershatter, "Regulating Sex in Shanghai," 146. 1 3 2 . Xue Liyong, "Ming-Qing shiqi de Shanghai changji," 1 5 4 - 5 5 . 1 3 3 . The present-day address of Huile Li is 726 Fuzhou Road. 1 3 4 . For information on the ranking of prostitutes in Shanghai, see Hershatter, "Hierarchy"; Tang Weikang, "Shili yangchang de changji"; Xue Liyong, "Ming-Qing shiqi de Shanghai changji"; Ping Jinya, "Jiu Shanghai de changji"; Xie Wuyi, "Minchu Shanghai changji yipie"; and Henriot, "From a Throne." 1 3 5 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 277. 136. According to household registration records, by the end of 1948 there were 1 5 1 brothels in Huile Li, with 200 registered brothel owners, 587 prostitutes, and 374 servants (jiyong). A January 1949 survey reported 1 7 1 brothels in the compound, that is, about one-fifth of Shanghai's brothels at that time. See Yang Jiezeng and He Wannan, Shanghai changji, 2 1 3 - 2 1 . 1 3 7 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 2 3 1 . The present-day address of Xiande Li is 539 Xizangzhong Road.

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1 3 8 . Ibid., 266. 1 3 9 . The name "Great R o a d " referred to Nanking Road. Thus the street can also be translated as the " N a n k i n g Road of the French Concession." Today this is Jinlingdong Road. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 267. The present-day address of Shengping Li is 396 Jinlingdong Road. 1 4 0 . Jia You, " S h a n g h a i longtang mian mian guan." 1 4 1 . Z h a o Y u m i n g , Zhongguo xiandai guangbo jianshi, 2 1 9 - 2 2 . 1 4 2 . The compound was also known as Ji'an Li (Alley of Luck and Peace). It was built in 1 9 2 9 and contained seventeen two-story shikumen houses. Its current address is Lanes 1 1 1 - 1 2 1 North M a o m i n g Road. Shanghai y a n g e bianxiezu, " S h a n g h a i de geming y i j i " ; Shanghaishi Jing'anqu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 1 4 8 . 1 4 3 . Shanghai y a n g e bianxiezu, " S h a n g h a i de geming y i j i , " 1 0 ; S h a n g haishi Hongkouqu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 3 1 1 . Li was executed by the Guomindang on the eve of the C o m m u n i s t s ' takeover of Shanghai in M a y 1 9 4 9 . His devotion to the secret radio station made him a nationally renowned hero and was made the subject of a popular movie, The Eternal Electric Wave (Yongbu xiaoshi de dianbo). 1 4 4 . Shanghai cidian, 504. 1 4 5 . You Youwei, Shanghai jindai Fojiao jianshi, 1 3 6 - 3 7 , 1 7 1 . CHAPTER 5 . B E H I N D S T O N E PORTALS 1 . I-15, August 1 7 , 1 9 9 3 . 2. Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 1 6 2 . 3. The custom prevailed in rural areas as well as in large cities like S h a n g hai, and it continued in Shanghai well into the 1980s. I - 1 5 , March 27, 1989; I-18, May 1 7 , 1 9 9 1 . 4. In Y u y a o , Zhejiang, for example, a standard nightstool was about two feet high and a little more than one foot in diameter. I - 1 8 , M a y 1 7 , 1 9 9 1 . 5. In m a n y Jiangnan villages, the f a m i l y toilet (nightstool) was customarily used only b y women and children. M e n went to the village manure pits. One informant suggested that, as in rural areas, in Shanghai it was regarded as somewhat sissified for a man to use the " h o n e y bucket" at home if a public lavatory was available nearby. I - 1 1 , March 2 0 , 1 9 8 9 . 6. C i t y authorities regulated the colors of the cart for the purpose of making them easily distinguishable f r o m other pushcarts. For the regulations on nightsoil carts, see Shanghai tebieshi z h e n g f u mishuchu, Shanghai tebieshi shizheng fagui huibian, 20. 7. Raising a f e w domestic fowl (chickens were most popular) was common among Shanghai families, particularly in the alleyway houses, where residents ingeniously used spaces like the front courtyard, the roof, the kitchen, and passageways or hallways to put a cage or even a small hut for domestic fowl. Rais-

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Notes to Pages 1 9 1 - 1 9 5

ing chickens was partly for fun, but more practically for improving the family diet. A homegrown chicken was believed more delicious than one from the market. I-23,1-24. 8. Shanghaishi tongzhiguan, Shanghaishi zhongyao faling huikart chubian, 34. Dumping nightsoil into a sewer, as some residents occasionally did when they missed the daily morning collection, was forbidden. It was not wise to do so either, because the pipes of the sewer system were small and easily plugged up. 9. I-26, August 6,1993. 10. Dingjiu, "Shanghai zhi chen zazouqu." 1 1 . Heppner, Shanghai Refuge, 85. 12. In 1986, more than 60 percent of Shanghai families lived in houses without sanitary fixtures. There were about 800,000 nightstools still in use. The number dropped afterward, but by the early 1990s no fewer than 600,000 nightstools were still being used in the city; see Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifeng, 320. The nightsoil carts were gradually eliminated in the 1980s. Instead, a cesspool, sheltered by a brick structure, was dug in the neighborhoods where "honey buckets" were still in use. The cesspool was constructed at the entrance of an alleyway. Residents poured their nightsoil in at designated hours, and a truck (with a huge tank) came daily to pump out the smelly contents and ship it to the countryside. 1 3 . I-14, March 23,1989. 14. Zhu Menghua, "Jiu Shanghai de sige feipin dawang," 162. 1 5 . Xue Gengshen, "Wo jiechu guo de Shanghai banghui renwu," 105. Although this applied to the pre-1949 era, the source does not indicate the exact time period when this fee was charged. Given the chaotic situation of Chinese currency in the 1940s, the figure "$0.20" (two jiao) presumably refers to the value of 20 percent of a silver dollar at the rate current in 1935, when the silver dollar (yinyuan) was transferred to the "legal currency" ( f a b i ) . 16. Shehui ribao, October 1 5 , 1 9 3 6 . 17. Xue Gengshen, "Wo jiechu guo de Shanghai banghui renwu," 105. 18. Pan, Shanghai, 100. 19. Xue Gengshen, "Wo jiechu guo de Shanghai banghui renwu," 1 0 5 - 6 ; Zhu Menghua," Jiu Shanghai de sige feipin dawang," 1 6 2 - 6 3 . 20. Shanghai shenghuo 1 , no. 1 (March 1939): 2. This was a pun, because in Shanghai and many other cities nightsoil was jokingly called "gold." 21. Keeping his hands as clean as possible was not only for the sake of the nightsoil man himself but also, perhaps more important, to prevent soiling the handles of nightstools. 22. A common violation was to empty the nightsoil cart by pouring the excrement into roadside sewers in order to save time. The Heads of Nightsoil, who saw this more as a loss of money than an environment problem, hired private patrols to check for violations. Once caught, a nightsoil man might be fined or fired. Shehui ribao, October 1 5 , 1 9 3 6 .

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23. Dingjiu, "Shanghai zhi chen zazouqu," 1 1 . Nightstools were so closely associated with the image of Shanghai's alleyways that an author satirically called the alleyway lives of Shanghai the "nightstool civilization" (matong wenming); see Mu Mutian, "Longtang." 24. Jiading used to be a county of Jiangsu province. Present-day Jiading is a suburban county of Shanghai municipality. Before the highway between Jiading and Shanghai was built in 1990, however, it was difficult (although not impossible) to make a round-trip in one day. 25. I-17. 26. Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifeng, 320. This is a description of the situation in the late 1980s. As mentioned earlier, things were virtually the same in the Republican era. 27. I-21, July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 . 28. Malone, New China, pt. 1 , p. 16; Nusheng 1 , no. 15: 6. 29. The five spices were prickly ash, star aniseed, cinnamon, clove, and fennel. 30. Lu Xun came to Shanghai in October 1927. The present address of his last residence in Shanghai—now a museum in his memory—is Number 9, Dalu Xincun, Shanyin Road. See Yang Jiayou, Shanghai fengwu gujintan, 265. 3 1 . Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 6 : 3 0 8 - 9 . 32. Hahn, China to Me, 9. 33. See chapter 6 for details. 34. Sergeant, Shanghai, caption to figure 34. 35. Tieh, "Street Music of Old Shanghai." 36. Dingjiu, "Shanghai chuxia jietou," 27. 37. I-22, August 3 , 1 9 9 5 . 38. Tieh, "More Street Music." A different version of the song of the ginkgo-nut seller can be found in Xu Baohua and Tang Zhenzhu, Shanghai shiqu fangyan zhi, 5 1 5 . 39. Tieh, "More Street Music of Old Shanghai." 40. Ibid. 41. Wei Hui, "Jiu Shanghai jietou de lutian zhiye." 42. Dingjiu, "Shanghai chuxia jietou," 27. 43. Shanghai Municipal Council Report for the Year 1 9 3 1 and Budget for the Year 1 9 3 2 , 1 3 0 . 44. Tieh, "Street Music of Old Shanghai." 45. "Dizzy sighted" refers to presbyopia. 46. Jiang Liyang, Haipai yinshi, 1 1 8 . 47. Shanghai shenghuo 1 , no. 5 (July 1937): 3 8 - 3 9 ; Jiang Liyang, Haipai yinshi, 1 1 8 - 1 9 . The word rehun (lit., hot and dizzy), meaning "craze," was of Ningbo origin. 48. Wang, Shanghai Boy, chapter 2. Wang's unpublished memoir is a fascinating account of the first twenty-two years of his life in Shanghai. 49. Wei Hui, "Jiu Shanghai jietou de lutian zhiye," 295.

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Notes to Pages

206-zij

50. Tieh, "Street Music of Old Shanghai"; Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 89-90. 5 1 . Wang, Shanghai Boy, chapter 4. For a similar song, see Xu Baohua and Tang Zhenzhu, Shanghai shiqu fangyan zhi, 5 1 5 - 1 6 . 52. Xu Dafeng, "Longtang texie." 53. Zheng Yimei, Yihai yishao, 69-72. 54. Lu Dafang, Shanghaitan yijiu, 4 3 - 4 4 . 55. Shehui ribao, November 8,1936. 56. I-38. 57. Xia Lingen, }iu Shanghai sanbai liushi hang, 2. 58. Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 6:309; Wei Hui, "Jiu Shanghai jietou de lutian zhiye"; Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 95, 219. 59. Xu Dafeng, "Longtang texie," 9. 60. Zheng Yimei, Yihai yishao, 136. 61. For instance, the child "Three-Hairs" (Sanmao), a protagonist in the famous cartoon series of Zhang Leping, Records of the Wandering Life of "Three-Hairs" (Sanmao liulangji), was a newspaper seller. See Zhang Leping, Zhang Leping's Caricatures, 4 2 - 4 4 , 5 4 - 5 5 . See also Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei xuanchuan bu, Shanghai min'ge xuan, for folk songs about child newspaper peddlers. 62. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge, 54. 63. I-21, August 1 1 , 1 9 9 5 ; I-27, August 1 0 , 1 9 9 5 . 64. I-39. See also the photo in Tata and McLachlan, Shanghai 1949, 106; Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai, 43, Tang Zhenchang, Jindai Shanghai fanhua lu, 270; Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, Shanghai zhanggu, 74. 65. Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 1 5 5 - 5 6 . 66. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 4 7 - 5 0 . 67. I-29, August 1 3 , 1996. The Shanghai version of this saying was "The more a man does needlework, the poorer he becomes" (nan zuo niigong, yuezuo yueqiong); see Hu Zude, Huyan, 1 1 . 68. Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 156. 69. I-30, I-33, I-34; Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 49, 55, 2 0 3 4, 2 1 1 . 70. Shanghaishi gongshang xingzheng guanliju and Shanghaishi xiangjiao gongye gongsi, Shanghai minzu xiangjiao gongye, 6 - 7 . 71. I-33. 72. I-21, July 1 4 , 1 9 9 3 ; I-25, July 1 5 , 1 9 9 3 . 73. The temporary stimulation provided by opium contributed to a widespread belief that the drug was a stimulant, not a depressant. 74. Shehui ribao, May 1 1 , 1 9 3 6 . 75. Xia Lingen, Jiu Shanghai sanbai liushi hang, 103; Shehui ribao, May i i , 1936. 76. Shehui ribao, May 1 1 , 1 9 3 6 . 77. Xiao Qian, Shehui baixiang, 4 7 - 4 8 .

Notes to Pages 217-221

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375

78. Bao Tianxiao, Shanghai chunqiu, 2 : 5 0 7 . 79. Wei Hui, "Jiu Shanghai jietou de lutian zhiye"; Shanghaishi shifan jiaoyanshi, Shanghai xiangtu wenhua shi, 1 5 9 . 80. I - 3 0 , 1 - 3 1 , 1 - 3 2 , 1 - 3 3 . A similar song appears in Tieh, " M o r e Street M u sic": "Exchange old articles! Have you got something for sale? A n y broken bottles and other useless things to part with?" 8 1 . Tongzhi Shanghai xianzhi, juan 7. 82. Ch'u, Local Government, 1 5 0 - 5 4 ; Hsiao, Rural China, 8 2 - 8 3 ; Kuhn, Rebellion, 6 1 - 6 2 , 1 0 0 ; Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 1 6 - 1 7 . Ch'u and Hsiao point out that the role of the baojia system has been exaggerated, and that overall the system was ineffective in the Qing. Naquin and Rawski state that "it is unclear if the baojia ever functioned as it was supposed to." 83. Wen Juntian, Zhongguo baojia zhidu, chapters 23 and 24. 84. Wakeman has argued that the Nationalists' effort to establish a modern police force in Shanghai in the Nanjing decade was chiefly for the purpose of making Shanghai a showcase to demonstrate that the Chinese were capable of running a modern city. See Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1 4 - 1 5 , 2 8 8 - 8 9 . 85. Shanghaishi nianjian, 1936: F : n o . Feetham, Report, vol. 1 , pt. 2, pp. 2 4 9 - 5 0 , contains details of the plan. 86. Chen Yanlin, Shanghai dichan daquan, 6 1 - 6 3 . 87. See Shanghai Municipal Archive, file number Q 1 0 7 . 88. Shanghaishi dang'an guan, Ri wei Shanghai shizhengfu, 35, 229, 254. 89. Ibid., 255. 90. Ibid., 229, 257; Gu Sifan, Shanghai fengwu hua, 1 1 . 91. Shanghaishi dang'an guan, Ri wei Shanghai shizhengfu, 1 6 1 - 6 2 . 92. Ibid., 6 0 4 - 6 , 6 0 9 - 1 1 ; Tao Juyin, Gudao jianwen, 180. 93. Shanghai Municipal Archives, R 3 3 , vol. 74, p. 8; vol. 75, pp. 9 6 - 9 7 ; vol. 2 2 1 , pp. 6 - 7 ; vol. 225, pp. 1 9 - 2 1 , 3 5 - 3 6 ; vols. 2 2 6 - 2 3 0 . See also Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, shang: 87; Tao Juyin, Gudao jianwen, 1 4 1 - 4 5 . 94. Shanghai Municipal Archives, R 3 3 , juan 65, p. 26. 95. Shanghaishi dang'an guan, Shanghai jiefang, 55. 96. Ibid., 1 0 - 1 2 . 97. Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei, Chengshi jiedao banshichu jumin weiyuanhui gongzuo shouce, 3. 98. On December 3 1 , 1 9 5 4 , the fourth session of the standing committee of the People's Congress passed two pieces of legislation on urban street offices and residents' committees respectively. Street offices were defined by the act as subagencies of city-administered districts, and were to be established in every city-administered district (or, in some cases, cities that were not divided into districts [i.e., small cities] with a population of more than 100,000). Residents' committees were defined as "mass, autonomous residents' organizations" under the guidance of the street offices. (English translations of the full text of these acts are in J. Cohen, Criminal Process.) B y August 1 9 5 5 , 1 2 9 cities had established street offices and/or residents' committees; in other words, 80 percent of the cities required by the 1 9 5 4 leg-

376

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Notes to Pages

221-226

islation to establish street organizations had done so. See Guangming ribao, August 9, 1955, p. 2. 99. I-30, I - 3 1 , 1 - 3 2 , 1 - 3 3 . 100. The Land of Peach Blossoms (shiwai taoyuan) was a Utopian world created by Tao Yuanming (326-97) in his classic essay "Peach Blossom Spring." It is the Chinese version of the "Garden of Eden," but an earthly paradise (i.e., without religious connotation). For an English translation of Tao's essay, see Lynn H. Nelson and Patrick Peebles, Classics of Eastern Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 1 2 4 - 2 5 . 1 0 1 . See, for example, the "Shanghai Municipal Council Rules with Respect to New Chinese Buildings," Shanghai Municipal Council Report for the Year 1916 and Budget for the Year 1917, 5 6 - 6 2 . For the regulations on housing and construction in both the International Settlement and the French Concession issued in 1923, see Chen Yanlin, Shanghai dichan daquan, appendix, 7 1 8 - 9 2 6 . 102. Xu Guozhen, Shanghai shenghuo, 22. 103. Shanghai shehui kexueyuan shehuixue yanjiusuo, "Shanghai jumin laiyuan diaocha," 18. 104. Whyte and Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China, 1 7 - 2 1 ; White, Policies of Chaos, 88-90. 105. I-34. 106. Huang, Peasant Economy, 23. 107. I-27, August 1 0 , 1 9 9 5 ; Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu, 2:1. 108. In Shanghai slang, there were the so-called upper corners (shang zhi jiao) and lower corners (xia zhijiao), which referred to higher-class and lowerclass residential areas respectively. The slang reflected more a general social bias or snobbery, so to speak, than an identity based on these "corners." See Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghairen, 5 8 - 6 5 . 109. See Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 80. 1 1 0 . I-38. 1 1 1 . On chókai (neighborhood associations) in Tokyo, see Bestor, Neighborhood Tokyo, especially pages 6 6 - 6 7 , 8 4 - 8 5 , 1 0 2 - 2 1 , and 266-67. 1 1 2 . Literally, "Alley of Abundance and Virtue." This twenty-unit alleyway-house compound was built in 1 9 1 9 on the boundary between the International Settlement and the French Concession. Its current address is Lanes 8 , 1 8 , and 38 of Yunnanzhong Road. In 1989, it housed 261 households, with a total of 837 residents. See Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 282. 1 1 3 . Shehui ribao, November 1 2 , 1 9 2 9 ; November 1 4 , 1 9 2 9 ; November 16, 1929; December 1 2 , 1 9 2 9 ; December 30,1929. 1 1 4 . Wang Weizu, Shanghaishi fangzu zhi yanjiu, 50500-50501 [or 174]. 1 1 5 . Jianzhu zhuankan, no. 1 (June 9,1934). 1 1 6 . Shibao, January 23, 1943; Wang Jishen, Shanghai zhi fangdichanye, 6 - 7 . 1 1 7 . Wang Weizu, Shanghaishi fangzu zhi yanjiu, 50497.

Notes to Pages 2 2 6 - 2 3 5

!

VJl

1 1 8 . "Report of the Housing Committee, 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 3 7 , " appendix 5; Jianzhu zhuankan, no. 1 (June 9,1934). 1 1 9 . Dingjiu, "Shanghai shimin shenghuo de zhuanbian"; Jiujun, "Shanghai 'xiaofangzi' cangsang." 120. Shenbao, December 29,1933; January 7,1934; January 1 7 , 1 9 3 4 ; February 20,1934; June 27,1934; Shanghaishi nianjian, 1935: B : i 6 - i 8 ; Jianzhu zhuankan, nos. 1 - 6 ; Shehui ribao, July 21, 1934; Shishi xinbao, October 19, 19341 2 1 . Shanghaishi Jing'anqu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 1 2 0 - 2 1 . 122. Sometimes a guojielou was connected to a regular unit to allow one more room for the unit. In more crowded neighborhoods, these floors were also rented out to regular tenants. In fact, because the guojielou had windows on both sides, which of course meant better ventilation and light, and only one guojielou was available in each lane, the guojielou floor or a unit with a guojielou annex was sometimes in demand. Mao Dun recalled that in February 1 9 2 1 he paid a "deposit" about seven times higher than the market rate to rent a "one-up, one-down" shikumen house with a "spanning-a-lane" annex in Hongxing Fang (Alley of Great Prosperity) in Baoshan Road, Zhabei. See Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu, 1 : 1 5 0 - 5 1 . 123. I-36,1-37. 124. Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghairen, 3 2 - 3 3 . 125. I-28, August 7,1995; I-29, August 7,1995; Wu Zaiyang, "Shijiao jiehe diqu jumin shenghuo shangyou zhuduo bubian." 126. The name Red Bean Lane was not real but a literary creation of the author, derived from an ancient poem by the famous Tang poet Wang Wei ( 7 0 1 761), "Red Beans Grow in Southern Country" (Hongdou sheng nanguo). "Red beans" are a symbol of homesickness in China. 127. Song Yuehui, "Kuanchang de tianjing hen jimo." 128. The current address of Jingyun Li is Lane 63, Hengbang Road. Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu, 2 : 2 - 3 ; Shanghaishi Hongkouqu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 236. 129. Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 6:84. 130. Shehui ribao, July 24,1936. 1 3 1 . Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu, 2:3. 132. Shehui ribao, July 24,1936. 1 3 3 . I-38. 134. A major complaint of people who moved from old alleyway neighborhoods to newly built apartment complexes in recent years was theft. Burglaries were much more frequent in apartment buildings than in lilong houses. See Wu Zaiyang, "Shijiao jiehe diqu jumin shenghuo shangyou zhuduo bubian," 147. 135. Luo Suwen, Shikumen: xunchang renjia, 1 5 8 - 7 1 . 136. Xiangyu, "Gelou shijing," 12. 1 3 7 . Xu Guibao, "Wo de Shanghai shenghuo," 25.

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Notes to Pages

235-241

1 3 8 . Liu Huogong, Shanghai zhuzhici, 55. 1 3 9 . Heppner, Shanghai Refuge, 85. 140. Wang Dingjiu, Shanghai menjing, section "Lian'ai de menjing," 12-13. 1 4 1 . 1-38,1-39. 1 4 2 . Shenbao, August 9 , 1 9 3 6 . 1 4 3 . Shanghaitan, 2:212-13. 1 4 4 . The name Lin Daiyu was taken from one of the protagonists of the Chinese classic The Dream of the Red Chamber. In the story, in Shanghai's first courtesan competition, which was sponsored by Youxi bao ("Entertainment Newspaper," edited by the prominent novelist Li Boyuan) in 1897, Lin was selected from among four finalists as Shanghai's number one courtesan: the four were entitled to the accolade "Four Great Attendants of Buddha" (si da Jin'gang). See Ping Jinya, "Jiu Shanghai de changji," 1 6 6 - 6 7 . 1 4 5 . Jiujun, "Shanghai 'xiaofangzi' cangsang." 146. I-29, August 7 , 1 9 9 5 ; I-30; I - 3 1 ; I-32. 147. I-34,1-35. 148. The "no tenant without a f a m i l y " restriction was mainly applied to alleyway houses, especially at the first renting. There was no such restriction in renting an apartment unit. See Xiao Lingjun, Shanghai changshi, 47. 149. The present-day address of Jiangyuan Long is Lane 432, Xinchang Road, Huangpu District. The murder made Jiangyuan Long notorious in the city. The residents' committee (jumin weiyuanhui, the second layer in the administrative hierarchy of the neighborhood organizations in PRC) there is named after the alleyway compound. See Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, yj, 249. 1 5 0 . Zhao Sufang, "Jiangyuanlong mousha qinfu an." Shanghai's major newspapers all had detailed reports on the case from March to M a y 1945. The June and July 1 9 4 5 issues of Zazhi magazine published a group of articles sympathetic to Zhou. On September 1 4 , 1945, the Shanghai Higher Court sentenced her to death. Zhou then appealed to the Supreme Court in Nanjing, which on February 2 0 , 1 9 4 8 , reduced the punishment to fifteen years in prison. Zhou lived into the 1990s as a day care worker in the Dafeng Labor Reform Farm in northern Jiangsu province. 1 5 1 . 1-38,1-39. 1 5 2 . Wei Shaochang,

Yuanyang

hudie

pai

yanjiu

ziliao,

1:178-79,

535-36. 1 5 3 . People heated the old-type flatiron by placing burning charcoal inside the iron chamber. Periodically they had to blow away the ash in order to keep the charcoal burning. 1 5 4 . Bao Tianxiao, Shanghai chunqiu, 2 : 6 9 5 - 9 6 . 1 5 5 . Ibid., 2:696; I-38. 1 5 6 . Ibid., 2:696. 1 5 7 . Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 6 : 9 9 - 2 0 0 .

Notes to Pages 241-252

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379

158. Ibid., 6 : 2 1 3 . 159. Li Zhisui, Private Life, 493. CHAPTER 6. BEYOND STONE PORTALS

1 . I-io, March 20, 1989; I-13; I-15, March 20,1989. 2. I-13; I-19, June 3 0 , 1 9 9 1 . 3. I-i8, May 1 7 , 1 9 9 1 ; I-20. 4. I-13. 5. I - 1 1 , March 20,1989; I-12; I-20. 6. For information on street names of Shanghai (old and new), see Shi Songjiu, Shanghaishi luming daquan, 3 5 3 - 9 2 . 7. I - 1 1 , 1 - 1 3 , 1 - 1 7 . 8. Shehui ribao, June 27,1936. 9. Shanghaishi shehuiju, Shanghai zhi shangye, 183. 10. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou, 90. 1 1 . Gongshang banyuekan 5, no. 19 (October 1 , 1 9 3 3 ) : 4 7 - 4 8 . 12. Bureau of Social Affairs, Wage Rates in Shanghai, 60. 1 3 . Gongshang banyuekan 5, no. 19 (October 1 , 1 9 3 3 ) : 47. 14. Lu Wenshao, "Benshi mihaoye zhi gaikuang." 15. Shanghaishi gongyong, Shanghai gongyong shiye, 2 5 - 2 6 , 3 8 - 3 9 . 16. Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai tongji nianjian, 198), 320. 1 7 . Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 71, 155; Xiao Lingjun, Shanghai changshi, 41. 18. Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai tongji nianjian, ip8j, 320. 19. Wang Chifeng and Qiu Huiyou, "Zenyang taotai Shanghai yibai ling siwan zhi meiqiulu?" 20. Emily Honig has mentioned that lighting the stove was the first thing women workers of Shanghai's cotton mills did in the morning. This was, in fact, a routine morning chore for every household in Shanghai that did not have a gas stove. Sisters and Strangers, 136; I - 1 1 , March 20,1989; I-12. 21. Yao Qingshan and Ang Jumin, Shanghai mishi diaocha, 3; I-12; I-13. 22. Chen Liang, "Yanzhidian," 14; I-15, March 23,1989. 23. I-15, March 27,1989. 24. Regarding the number of stores, see Shanghai xintuo gufen youxian gongsi, Shanghai fengtu zaji, 3 1 ; quote from Shehui ribao, August 15, 1936. 25. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 4 7 2 - 7 3 . These numbers include both retail and wholesale stores; the source does not specify the numbers in each category. No doubt most of these enterprises were small retail stores. Out of 8,600 stores in 1949, about 1,300 were wholesalers. 26. I-15, March 23,1989; I-19, June 2 9 , 1 9 9 1 ; Shanghai fengtu zaji, 3 1 . 27. Note that A Chinese-English Dictionary (compiled by Beijing Foreign Language College [Beijing: Commercial Press, 1979]) translates yi-shi-zhu-

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Notes to Pages

253-255

xing as "food, clothing, shelter and transportation." This was probably to make the translation more idiomatic in English. Or, the translators were puzzled by the original order in Chinese and, assuming that food should be more important than other necessities of life, shifted the order. 28. See Cihai, 1 9 1 5 . 29. A slightly different version was zhi zhong yishan bu zhong ren (Paying attention only to attire, not to the person). See Xu Guozhen, Shanghai shenghuo, 29; Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, pt. 3, p. 16; Leng Xingwu, Zuixin Shanghai zhinan, 1 4 5 . 30. Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 4 : 5 6 3 . Lu Xun himself once had an unpleasant experience in the Cathay Hotel, one of the most luxurious hotels on Nanking Road. Dressed in his usual blue cotton gown and rubber shoes, and with hair untidy, Lu Xun went to the hotel to visit a British friend who had a room on the seventh floor. As Lu Xun walked into an elevator in the lobby, the elevator operator, who was supposed to operate the device for every guest, pretended not see him. Lu Xun waited in the elevator for a while, but seeing no other guests walk in he asked the operator to take him "to the seventh floor." The operator looked Lu Xun up and down for a second and then told him, "Get out of here!" Lu Xun had no choice but to take the stairway. Two hours later, when Lu Xun finished his visit and his British friend solicitously walked out with him to the elevators, it happened that the same elevator stopped on that floor. Now the operator, obviously quite embarrassed, served Lu Xun respectfully. Later, when Lu Xun told his friends the story, he seemed amused rather than offended by the event. Indeed, according to convention in the city at the time, the writer's eccentricity, more than the operator's snobbery, was at fault for the incident. See Uchiyama, "Rojin sensei" ("Lu Xun xiansheng"); Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghairen, 48. 3 1 . Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghairen, 20. Here the "beggar" was a representative of all types of poor people, not necessarily mendicants alone; "Western clothing" refers to expensive and formal dress; and "cooking his own rice" implies that the person was not rich enough to hire a maid and therefore had to do all kinds of household chores himself. To the people of Shanghai, this saying conveyed an image of a middle-aged man dressed in a shoddy Western business suit cooking in front of a dirty coal stove. 32. Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, pt. 3, pp. 1 9 - 2 2 ; Xu Guozhen, Shanghai shenghuo, 2,}-)6. 33. A penholder is shaped like an outline of three hills linked together. The center "hill" is the tallest; the other two are lower. Pens (or, more accurately, brushes) can be rested on the "valleys" between the hills. In a pocket flap, the shape is upside-down. 34. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 3 4 0 - 4 1 . 35. Xiong Yuezhi, "Zatan 'Shanghairen.'" 36. Luo Shuang, "Pouxi" Shanghairen, 92-95. 37. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu

Notes to Pages 255-261

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381

Shangyezhi, 3 4 6 - 5 3 ; Zhang Baogao and Fan Nengchuan, Shanghai luyou wenhua, 2 1 0 - 1 1 . 38. The name "Hongbang" is sometimes misleading, since it literally means "Red Gang," but in truth it had nothing to do with gangs. " H o n g " was a mispronunciation of " F e n g " (the abbreviated name for Ningbo; many cities in China have an abbreviated, single character name) in the Shanghai dialect (in which " f e n g " is pronounced " f o n g " ) . See Luo Shuang, "Pouxi" Shanghairen, 93. Also, "Hongbang" may have a meaning similar to "Fanbang" ("barbarian type"), implying that these were Western-type tailors. For instance, all carpenters (regardless of their native-place origins) who worked for foreign shipyards in nineteenth-century Shanghai were called "Hongbang" carpenters (see Shanghaishi gongshang xingzheng guanliju, Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye, 1 : 5 9 - 6 1 ) . The word "hong," or "red," probably derived from the Chinese notion, which arose in the nineteenth century, that Europeans were "red-haired devils" (hongmao gui). 39. Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, pt. 3, pp. 2 2 - 2 4 . 40. Ibid., 24. 4 1 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 329, 332. 42. Ibid., 3 2 9 - 3 0 . 43. See appendix 1 , "Patterns of Obtaining Clothing." 44. I-38. 45. Tian Yuan, Sanbai liushi hang tushuo, 7 7 - 7 8 . 46. This custom had contributed to the popular demand for household sewing machines. During the Mao era, the sewing machine was one of the "Four Bigs" (referring to four highly desired light industrial products: bicycles, wristwatches, radios, and sewing machines), all of which were rationed. I-16; I-38; see also Spence, Search for Modern China, 733. 47. Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 42. 48. Bao Kanbu, Shili Yangchang zhongshengxiang, 60. 49. Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu, pt. 3, pp. 2 0 - 2 1 . 50. Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghai ren, 22. 5 1 . Niisheng 1 , no. 4 : 1 9 . 52. Shehui ribao, September 1 8 , 1 9 3 4 . 53. Ibid., September 1 0 , 1934; Wang Dingjiu, Shanghai menjing, section "Chi de mingjing," 3 1 , 33 - 3 5 . 54. Shanghai in the 1940s had about 1 , 2 0 0 wine shops, most of which were family-run small retail businesses. From the late nineteenth century on, the trade had developed into three major types, each with its own trade association: white spirits (distilled from Chinese sorghum), Fen spirit (distilled in Fenyang, Shanxi province), and Shaoxing wine (distilled in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province). Wine was also sold in "soy sauce stores" (jiangyou dian, zaofang, or jiangyuan). See Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 473 - 7 4 . 55. Wang Dingjiu, Shanghai menjing, section "Chi de menjing," 3 1 .

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Notes to Pages

262-267

56. Ibid., 30. 57. Shehui ribao, September 1 2 , 1 9 3 4 . 58 Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 3; Bureau of Social Affairs, Wage Rates in Shanghai, 60, 80; Shen Bojing et al., Shanghaishi zhinan, 3 0 2 - 7 ; Jiang Siyi et al., "Shanghai de qigai," 209. 59. Following are the percentages of household expenditures based on two surveys of working-class families in Shanghai in 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 0 :

Food Clothing Housing Rent Fuel and Light Miscellaneous

Survey 1 (November 192J to October 1928)

Survey 2 (April 1929 to March 1930)

56.0 9.4 6.4 7.5 20.6

53.2 7.5 8.3 6.4 24.6

Survey 1 did not provide information on how much was spent in restaurants. In Survey 2,4.8 percent of food expenditures was for meals eaten in restaurants and 1.8 percent for take-out dishes ordered from restaurants. See Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 104, 1 1 3 - 1 4 ; Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo, 36. 60. Shanghai shenghuo, no. 3 (December 1 5 , 1 9 2 6 ) : 35. 61. Xu Guibao, "Wo de Shanghai shenghuo." 62. I-14, March 23,1989. 63. Sheng Juncai, "Shanghai shuiluye de bianqian;" Shehui ribao, June 27, 1936. 64. See chapter 3 for details. 65. For example, G. William Skinner found that the peasants of Chengdu (Sichuan province) liked to chat in teahouses while Philip Huang found that the teahouse was irrelevant to common peasants on the North China plain. See Skinner, "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China"; and Huang, Peasant Economy, 2 2 0 - 2 2 . 66. Fan Shuzhi, Ming-Qing Jiangnan shizhen tanwei, 2 7 9 - 8 3 . 67. Shen Bojing and Chen Huaipu, Shanghaishi zhinan, 137. 68. Yangjiayou, Shanghai fengwu gujintan, 237. 69. I-14, March 23,1989; I-17. 70. I-9; Shehui ribao, November 1 3 , 1936. 71. I-9, I-20. 72. I-16; I-14, March 20, 1989; Tang Weikang et al., Shanghai yishi, 305. 73. Xia Lingen, Jiu Shanghai sanbai liushi hang, 6 4 - 6 5 . 74. Shanghaishi Jing'anqu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 219. This bathhouse was for men only, but public bathhouses for women had been available in Shanghai since 1 9 1 2 ; see Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 6 7 0 - 7 1 . 75. In 1937 at the center of the International Settlement (roughly today's

Notes to Pages 267-272

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Huangpu District) there were 24 sizable public bathhouses. The number increased to 29 in 1946; 22 of those bathhouses had, in total, 3 , 1 8 9 seats and employed more than two thousand bath attendants. See Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 6 7 1 . 76. Gernet, Daily Life, 1 2 4 - 2 5 . 77. Fortune, Three Years' Wanderings, 266. 78. Ge Yuanxi, Huyou zaji, 33. The cost of a bath in 1 8 7 6 was 70 copper cash (wen) in the luxury section and 35 copper in the economy section. Fortune also recorded the rates in the bathhouse he visited in the early 1840s: 6 copper cash in the economy section and 1 8 copper cash in the luxury section. He exclaimed about the low prices, " I may mention that one hundred copper cash amount to about 4.5 d. of our money; so that the first class enjoy a hot water bath for about one farthing! and the other a bath, a private room, a cup of tea, and a pipe of tobacco for something less than one p e n n y ! " Fortune, Three Years' Wanderings, 266. 79. Bao Kanbu, Shili Yangchang zhongshengxiang, 14-18. 80. Xia Lingen, Jiu Shanghai sanbai liushi hang, 6 4 - 6 7 . 8 1 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 673. 82. Services like "body brushing," "back massages," and "foot cleaning" were usually not available in a laohuzao bathhouse. 83. Qian Nairong, Shanghai fangyan liyu, 2 1 2 ; Yiming, Shanghai shi, 69. 84. Zhang Chunhai, Hucheng suishi quge, 20; Jiaqing Songjiang fuzhi, juan 5 : 4 ; Ying Baoshi, Tongzhi Shanghai xianzhi, juan 1 : 1 2 . 85. Hu Xianghan, Shanghai xiaozhi, 42. 86. Ibid. 87. Read et al., Shanghai Foods, 7 - 3 5 ; Jiang Liyang, Haipai yinshi, 7 2 - 7 3 . 88. Hahn, China to Me, 9. 89. Shanghaishi shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renlichefu shenghuo zhuangkuang diaocha baogaoshu," pt. 2, pp. 4 4 - 4 5 ; Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong, 6 7 5 - 7 6 . 90. I - 1 1 , March 2 5 , 1 9 8 9 ; I - 1 8 , May 1 8 , 1 9 8 9 . 91. Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale, 79. 92. Jingguan, "Jiuwen shiling," 1 0 4 - 5 ; Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 1 4 1 ; W u Shenyuan, Shanghai zuizao de zhongzhong, 8 2 - 8 3 . 93. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 141, 563. 94. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 429; Hu Xianghan, Shanghai xiaozhi, 46; W u Shenyuan, Shanghai zuizao de zhongzhong, 8 3 - 8 4 . Some of these markets are still in business in presentday Shanghai. 95. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 4 4 4 - 4 5 . 96. For instance, the Wuzhou Food Market, a medium-size food market in Hongkou, was built on a spot where a number of food peddlers gathered every

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morning. In 1 9 1 4 , it became a regular food market housed in a single-story concrete building. By the late 1940s, the market had 256 food stalls and was surrounded by various types of small stores. The food market served as the center of a fairly busy commercial area. See Shanghaishi Hongkouqu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 490. 97. In Jianye Li, for instance, the builder deliberately left an area (where a row of houses could have been built) inside the walled compound as a space to allow peddlers to sell their goods. Gradually an open-air food market emerged there, to the convenience of the residents. Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu, Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu dimingzhi, 1 9 1 . 98. Shanghaishi Hongkouqu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 478. 99. Shanghaishi Jing'anqu, Shanghaishi ]ing'anqu dimingzhi, 338-39. The phrase "upper corner" referred to wealthy residential areas, as opposed to working-class neighborhoods known as "lower corner." 100. Shanghaishi Luwanqu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 69, 259; Shanghaishi Hongkouqu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 485; Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 570. 1 0 1 . Shanghaishi Hongkouqu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 482 and 485. 1 0 2 . W u Shenyuan, Shanghai zuizao de zhongzhong, 84; Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 430. 1 0 3 . I-22, July 1 4 , 1993. 104. Sinclair and Wong, Cultural Shock! 182. 1 0 5 . Jiang Liyang, Haipai yinshi, 96. 106. An informant who visited her daughter in the United States said she did not enjoy her stay very much because her daughter was quite "Americanized"—in order to keep the house clean the daughter would not allow stirfrying, the mother's favorite type of cooking. I-20. 1 0 7 . Jiang Liyang, Haipai yinshi, 9 7 - 9 8 , 1 0 1 . 108. Bureau of Social Affairs, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers, 111-14. 109. Chen Da, Woguo kangRi zhanzheng shiqi shizheng gongren shenghuo, 3 2 0 - 2 6 . 1 1 0 . Bernard Read et al., Shanghai Foods, 8 7 - 1 0 1 . The list was presented to informants ( I - 2 8 , 1 - 2 9 , 1 - 3 4 , 1 - 3 5 , 1 - 3 8 ) for verification. 1 1 1 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 570; Shanghaishi Luwanqu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 69; Jiang Liyang, Haipai yinshi, 107. 1 1 2 . A f t e r Liberation the local food market became even more important in daily life. Since food peddlers were almost entirely eliminated from the city and numerous foods were put on ration, the food market was virtually the only source for so-called nonstaple food supplies (that is, almost everything except the staple food, grain). For about three decades prior to Deng Xiaoping's economic reform, which diversified food supplies by allowing free markets to operate and peasants to enter the city to sell their products, food markets were al-

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ways crowded with people queuing up in front of the various food stalls. A popular saying frequently cited by both the official media and common people revealed the vital importance of the food markets: "To see the [political and economic] situation through the little foods bamboo basket" (xiaocailan li kan xingshi). I-18, May 1 7 , 1 9 9 1 ; I-36; I-37; I-38. 1 1 3 . Skinner, "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China," pt. 1 , p. 20. 1 1 4 . See appendix 1 , " S u r v e y Spots and Number of People Surveyed, by Neighborhood" and "Patterns of Shopping Behavior." 1 1 5 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 2 7 0 - 7 1 . 1 1 6 . I-17. 1 1 7 . I-9; I - 1 0 , March 2 0 , 1 9 8 9 ; I - 1 1 , March 20, 1989; I - 1 2 ; I - 1 4 , March 20, 1989. 1 1 8 . Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu dimingzhi, 397; Shanghaishi Luwanqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Luwanqu dimingzhi, 1 9 1 . 1 1 9 . Zhang Baogao and Fan Nengchuan, Shanghai luyou wenhua, 197. See also appendix 1 , "Patterns of Shopping Behavior," for the percentages of residents who did most of their shopping at regional commercial centers. 1 2 0 . Shanghaishi Jing'anqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 4 0 1 - 1 8 ; Shanghaitong she, Shanghai yanjiu ziliao, 2 2 4 - 2 6 ; You Youwei, "Shanghai Yufo chansi." 1 2 1 . Shanghaitong she, Shanghai yanjiu ziliao, xuji, 7 1 9 - 2 4 ; Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu dimingzhi, 9 5 - 9 6 . 1 2 2 . Liu Linsheng, "Caojiadu diaochaji"; Shanghaishi Putuoqu renmin zhengfu, Putuoqu dimingzhi, 7 7 - 7 8 , 234; Shanghaishi Jing'anqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 92; Shanghaishi Changningqu renmin zhengfu, Changningqu dimingzhi, 7 0 - 7 1 . 1 2 3 . Shibao, January 1 9 , 1 9 1 4 ; Zheng Zuan, Shanghai diming xiaozhi, 2 0 23, and "Jindai Zhabei de xingshuai"; Ma Xuexin et al., Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian, 204. 1 2 4 . "Xiahaipu" literally means "lower sea creek." The creek was connected with another branch of the Huangpu River, Shanghaipu (upper sea creek); from Shanghaipu came the name of the town Shanghai. See Tongzhi Shanghai xianzhi, juan 1:2. 1 2 5 . Shanghaishi Hongkouqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Hongkouqu dimingzhi, 1 4 1 - 4 2 ; Wang Zheng, "Xiahai miao he Shanghai miao." 126. Lin Xingyuan, "Shanghai de jiu chengyuan"; Zheng Zuan, "Shanghai jiu xiancheng." 1 2 7 . Wang Yingxia, Wang Yingxia zizhuan, 7 7 - 7 8 . 1 2 8 . Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 5 1 . 1 2 9 . Renmin ribao, October 2 1 , 1 9 6 6 . 1 3 0 . This small street has gained some importance in Communist history. In 1920, Mao Zedong lived in House Number 29 of Cihou Nanli (Alley of Benevolence and Kindness, southern section), a lilong compound built in 1 9 1 0 -

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1 2 (and owned by Silas Aaron Hardoon) on Annam Road. The site is now a specially preserved relic. Shanghaishi Jing'anqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 243, 214; Shanghai difangshi ziliao, 6:^-39. 1 3 1 . Fei Xichou, Shanghai xinzhinan, 1 3 3 ; Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 4 4 4 - 4 5 . 1 3 2 . Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 4 6 - 4 7 . 133. I-12. 1 3 4 . Yuan Jianmin and Hu Jianyu, "Shimin zaocan zhuangkuang lingren danyou." 1 3 5 . Shen Shanzeng, "Pingchang xin shi dao," 4 1 - 4 2 . 1 3 6 . Xiong Yuezhi, "Zatan 'Shanghai ren.'" 1 3 7 . Anderson, Food of China, 196. 1 3 8 . Shehui ribao, November 3 , 1 9 3 6 . 1 3 9 . Shanghaishi zonggonghui, Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi, 246. 140. The general lack of refrigerators in common households was one of the reasons for this custom. In 1989, a survey of 3,000 households that owned a refrigerator showed a low refrigerator-ownership rate before 1980: of the households surveyed, 92.6 percent had first purchased a refrigerator in 1 9 8 5 89, and 6.6 percent in 1 9 8 0 - 8 4 ; only .8 percent of the families had owned a refrigerator for more than ten years. See W u Zaiyang, "Shiqu jumin dianbingxiang zhuanti baogao," 1 1 0 . 1 4 1 . Xu Dafeng, "Longtang texie"; I - 4 1 . 1 4 2 . I-9; I - 1 2 ; I - 1 4 , March 2 0 , 1 9 8 9 . 1 4 3 . Shanghai bowuguan, Shanghai beike ziliao xuanji, 3 6 5 - 6 6 ; Lu Wenshao, "Benshi mihaoye zhi gaikuang"; Yao Qingshan and A n Jumin, Shanghai mishi diaocha, 1 - 6 . 144. Sheng Juncai, "Shanghai shuiluye de bianqian"; Shehui ribao, June 2 7 , 1 9 3 6 . 1 4 5 . Sheng Juncai, "Shanghai shuiluye de bianqian." 146. Fang Xiantang, Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye, 1 2 5 ; Shanghai baihuo gongsi, Shanghai jindai baihuo shangye shi, 28. 1 4 7 . Shehui ribao, November 1 3 , 1936. 148. Jiang Shenwu, "Qingji Shanghai difang zizhi y u ji'erte," 148; Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang," 49; Shehui ribao, November 3 , 1 9 3 6 . 149. Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong zhuangkuang," 49. In later years, jiangyuan were merged into larger mills. B y the late 1940s, Shanghai had 30 jiangyuan, with 1,200 workers (or 40 workers per jiangyuan on average); see Shanghaishi zonggonghui, Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi, 246. 1 5 0 . Lu Wenshao, "Benshi mihaoye zhi gaikuang." 1 5 1 . Shehui ribao, November 1 3 , 1936. 1 5 2 . Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 1 1 1 5 . 1 5 3 . Shehui ribao, March 1 9 , 1 9 3 6 . 1 5 4 . Ibid., November 1 3 , 1936.

Notes to Pages 288-295

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3^7

155. Sheng Juncai, "Shanghai shuiluye de bianqian"; Shehui ribao, May 19, 1936. 156. I-12. 157. Kirby, "China Unincorporated." 158. Henriot, Shanghai, 1927-1937, chapters 7 - 9 . 159. Kirby, "China Unincorporated"; Wakeman, "Licensing Leisure"; Hershatter, "Regulating Sex in Shanghai." 160. Henriot, Shanghai, 1927-1937,161-64. 1 6 1 . I-9. 162. Shanghai minshi, Shanghai minshi tiaojie xiehui baogao, 2. 163. Henriot, Shanghai, 1927-1937, 218. 164. Shanghaishi dang'an guan, Ri wei Shanghai shizhengfu, 568. 165. Shanghai minshi, Shanghai minshi tiaojie xiehui baogao, 2-4; Xu Piaoping, "Shangjie lingxiu Yu Qiaqing." 166. Tao Juyin, Gudao jianwen, 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 . 167. Yan Esheng, Shangren tuanti zuzhi guicheng; Huang Yifeng et al., Jiu Zhongguo minzu zichanjieji, 368-69. 168. Shanghai wujin jixie gongsi et al., Shanghai jindai wujin, 255; Shanghai baihuo gongsi, Shanghai jindai baihuo shangye shi, 28, 278. 169. Bergère, Golden Age, 9. 170. Henriot, Shanghai, 1927-1937, 163-64. 1 7 1 . Shanghai shizhengfu mishuchu, Shanghaishi xingzheng tongji gaiyao, 81. 172. Sheng Juncai, "Shanghai shuiluye de bianqian." 173. Yiming, Shanghai shi, 86. 174. Shehui ribao, June 2 1 , 1 9 3 6 ; and October 1 0 , 1 9 3 6 . 175. Shehui yuekan 2, nos. 7 &c 8 (August 5,1947): 1 4 7 - 4 8 . 176. Shehui ribao, November 29,1936. 177. Shanghaitan, 3 : 1 0 7 ; Shehui ribao, November 29,1936. 178. I-15, March 27,1989. 179. Shehui ribao, August 1 5 , 1 9 3 6 . 180. Ibid., November 29,1936. 1 8 1 . Martin, Shanghai Green Gang, 64-78, 1 1 3 - 3 4 , 1 5 8 - 8 9 . 182. I-10, March 26,1989. 183. Jiang Siyi and Wu Yuanshu, Shanghai qibai ge qigai de shehui diaocha, 8 1 - 8 3 ; Jiang Siyi and Wu Yuanshu, "Shanghai de qigai." CONCLUSION

1 . A third category, "bureaucratic capitalism" (referring to the enterprises owned or run by the Nationalist elites), was sometimes added to form what was known as the "Three Mountains" to be overthrown by the revolution. See Mao, Selected Works, 3 : 2 7 1 - 7 4 . 2. Mao Zedong himself well understood this situation: he once referred to

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himself as a "big cannon" of ideological slogans and laughed at the idea that anyone would seriously believe them. See Kissinger, White House Years, 1062; and "Philosopher and the Pragmatist" (Newsweek, March 3 , 1 9 9 7 ) . 3. "Ren wang gaochu zou, shui wang dichu liu," see Zhongguo suyu dacidian, 7 1 2 . 4. Feng Zikai, Feng Zikai wenji, 6 : 5 9 3 . 5. In the national calendar, years were dated by their distance from the 1 9 1 1 revolution; that is, 1 9 1 2 was designated as the "first year of the republic," 1 9 1 3 as the "second year of the republic," and so on. But the Gregorian year was often used in tandem with the republican year in calendars and publications (such as newspapers, periodicals, and copyright dates of books). Days and months were counted by the Western calendar. 6. Smith, Chinese Almanacs, 4 1 . 7. Originally, " D u a n w u " meant "the fifth day (of the fifth month)." The original character wu (five) was replaced by a homonym character, wu (noon), probably suggesting the bright sun at high noon on a sunny midsummer's day (Duanwu usually falls early in June). " D u a n y a n g " may be translated as "sedate sun." See Cihai, 1789. 8. Shanghai shenghuo 3, no. 1 (January 1939): 4; Shanghaishi gongshang xingzheng guanliju and Shanghaishi fangzhipin gongsi, Shanghaishi mianbu shangye, 467; Shanghaishi liangshiju et al., Zhongguo jindai mianfen gongye shi, 3 3 1 . 9. The Western calendar has been called the "public calendar" (gongli) since the founding of the People's Republic. 1 0 . Tang Weikang and Du Li, Hucheng fengsu ji, 3 6 - 3 9 . 1 1 . See Shanghai shenghuo 3, no. 2 (February 1939): 3 - 7 , for a detailed report on how the 1 9 3 9 Chinese New Year was celebrated in the city. Shanghai's foreign communities followed local custom by taking four days off. A foreign resident in Shanghai wrote, "It was the biggest date on the Chinese calendar. Weeks before were spent in preparation. Chinese homes were thoroughly cleaned. Every effort was made to pay up all outstanding debts. The night itself was one continuous wave of popping firecrackers. What interested us most was the ritual surrounding the benign Kitchen God." Carney, Foreign Devils Had Light Eyes, 1 1 9 . See also a "bamboo branch poem" cited in Tang Weikang et al., Hucheng fengsu ji, 42. 1 2 . Tang Weikang et al., Hucheng fengsu ji, 5 4 - 5 8 . 1 3 . Carney, Foreign Devils Had Light Eyes, 1 2 0 . 1 4 . Jia, no. 9 (October 1946): 29; I-23. 1 5 . Yulanpen (sometimes simplified as "Lanpen") is a transliteration of the Sanskrit term "Ullambana," which may be literally translated as "save the upside-down [i.e., the suffering]" or, broadly, "salvation." 1 6 . Shanghai zhoubao 2, no. 1 6 (September 1 4 , 1933): 2 4 8 - 4 9 . 1 7 . The Communists inherited the tuanbai institution. For decades, group New Year's calls have been a major activity among officialdom and are publicized in the news media. Sensitive personnel changes among the top leadership

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might be divined from the publicized list of officials who participated in the calls. Deng Xiaoping's once-a-year public appearances in his later years, for instance, were deliberately made on this New Year tuanbai occasion. 18. Shanghai shenghuo 2, no. 7 (December 1938): 2; 3, no. 1 (January 1939): 2 - 5 . 19. Bird, Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 25. 20. Liu Ya'nong, Shanghai minsu xianhua, 67. 21. Shanghaishi jiaotong yunshu ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 19. 22. Ibid., 1 9 - 2 0 . 23. Tang Weikang and Du Li, Hucheng fengsu ji, 99. 24. Elvin, "Market Towns and Waterways." 25. Hongzhi Shanghai zhi, juan 1: chengchi. 26. Jiaqing Shanghai xianzhi, juan 1: tushuo. 27. Shanghaishi jiaotong yunshu ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 2 0 - 2 1 . 28. Hu Xianghan, Shanghai xiaozhi, 13. 29. In the International Settlement alone, 268 automobile licenses were issued in 1912. By 1927, the number of licenses increased to 5,328; all were for foreign-made cars. Registered wheelbarrows in the Settlement decreased from 6,135 i n I 9 ° 2 t 0 5/804 in 1910. Still, wheelbarrows remained numerous in Shanghai throughout the Republican period. See Shanghaishi jiaotong yunshu ju, Shanghai gonglu yunshu shi, 8 2 - 8 3 , 2 2 - 2 3 . 30. Pal, Shanghai Saga, i6j. 3 1 . Wang Yingxia, Wang Yingxia zizhuan, 77; also in Shanghaishi wenshi yanjiu guan, Haishang chunqiu, 5 0 - 5 1 . 32. Wolf, Urban Village; Gans, Urban Villagers. 33. Perry, Shanghai on Strike, 24; Jiangnan, Jiangnan zaochuan changshi, 35-3634. Honig, Sisters and Strangers, 136, 2 1 7 - 2 4 . 35. Buck, Urban Change in China, 12, 210. 36. Bestor, Neighborhood Tokyo, 39-40. 37. Anderson, Food of China, 253. 38. Tang and Shen, Shanghai shi, 7; Bergère, "'Other China'"; Murphey, History of Asia, 346; Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire, 9. 39. See Yue Zheng, Jindai Shanghairen shehui xintai, 5; Shen Weibing and Jiang Ming, Ala Shanghairen, 1 0 - 1 4 ; Luo Shuang, "Pouxi" Shanghairen, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 ; Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifeng, 4 5 7 - 8 1 . 40. Xiong Yuezhi, "Zatan 'Shanghairen.' " 41. Yu Qiuyu, Wenming de suipian, 206. 42. Quote from Pan Ling, In Search of Old Shanghai, 130. 43. Zhang Ailing, Zhang Ailing wenji, 4 : 1 9 - 2 0 . 44. In the eyes of many Westerners in Shanghai, the city was not just a place to sojourn but a permanent home. Given the fact that most Chinese Shanghainese had themselves emigrated from elsewhere, the Westerners in the city were in a sense "Shanghainese" of foreign origin. 45. The opening quotation on the stock exchange was known as the kaipan

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(opening tray) and the closing quotation as the shoupan (closing tray). Cheating foreign customers (i.e., giving them an unreasonable price) was thus called anpan (hidden tray). Shanghaishi dang'an guan, Jiu Shanghai de zhengquan jiaoyi, 49. 46. Qian Nairong, "Shili yangchang hua fangyan"; Luo Shuang, "Pouxi " Shanghairen, 1 0 6 - 7 ; I~ 2 7' August 1 0 , 1995. 47. Zhang Ailing, Zhang Ailing wenji, 4 : 2 0 . 48. Luo Shuang, "Pouxi" Shanghairen, 116. 49. Jiefang ribao, March 5 , 1 9 8 6 . 50. The term "Haipai" was originally created in the late nineteenth century to refer to Shanghai-style painting and Shanghai-style Peking Opera. Later, the term was used in literary circles and figured prominently in a debate in 1 9 3 3 and 1 9 3 4 between hinterland-based writers such as Shen Congwen and Shanghai writers. Since the 1 9 3 0 s the terms "Jingpai" and "Haipai" have become broadly defined terms to refer to the general cultural differences between Shanghai and the "hinterlands" (represented by Beijing). For a discussion of the historical background of Jingpai and Haipai, see Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifeng, 6 9 - 1 1 7 . 5 1 . Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 6 : 3 0 2 . 52. Xu Ke, Qing bai lei chao, vol. )j{xiju):23. 53. See, for example, Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning; Xiong, " S u i Yangdi and the Building of Sui-Tang Luoyang." 54. Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji, 6 : 3 0 2 . 55. Lee, introduction. 56. Wang Tao, Wang Tao riji, 1 1 6 . 57. Wodusheng, Huitu Shanghai Zaji, juan 3 : 6 ; Shenbao, October 3 1 , 1904. 58. Chen Duxiu, Duxiu wencun, 589, 595. 59. B e r g è r e , ' " O t h e r China.'" 60. Mao Zedong once used this proverb in one of his poems, "The Capture of Nanjing, April 1949," which was frequently cited during the Cultural Revolution. For both the Chinese original and an English translation, see Barnstone, Poems of Mao Tse-tung, 7 6 - 7 7 . 6 1 . Shanghaishi Jing'anqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 22; Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu dimingzhi, 3 1 . 62. Shanghaishi Jing'anqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Jing'anqu dimingzhi, 1 - 4 , 2 1 - 2 4 ; Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu renmin zhengfu, Shanghaishi Xuhuiqu dimingzhi, 3 1 . Similar examples can be found all over the city as recorded in the dimingzhi (gazetteers) of various districts published in 1 9 8 8 1990. 63. The administrative hierarchy in urban industries and commerce in the People's Republic follows this pattern: the municipal council or city government supervises bureaus ( ju), bureaus supervise corporations (gongsi), and corporations supervise factories and stores. Since 1956, there have been two Bu-

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reaus of Commerce in Shanghai. The First Bureau of Commerce supervises large commercial enterprises such as major department stores, while the Second Bureau of Commerce supervises small stores. 64. Here, the term "joint state and private operated" refers to a government policy of redemption (or buyout) of private businesses during the 1 9 5 6 campaign. The government took over private businesses first but promised to pay premiums to the former owners within seven years of the "buyout." This program was extended to ten years in 1963 and suspended in September 1966; owners were never fully paid (Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo, Shanghai ziben zhuyi gongshangye de shehui zhuyi gaizao, 2 2 4 - 5 6 ) . 65. I-18, M a y 1 8 , 1 9 9 1 ; Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi, 733. 66. I - 1 2 . 67. I - 1 3 ; I - 1 4 , March 23, 1989; I-16; I - 1 8 , M a y 1 7 , 1 9 9 1 ; I - 1 9 , June 29, 1 9 9 1 . A detailed description of the rationing system in urban China (with slight differences from the Shanghai case) is given in Whyte and Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China, 8 6 - 9 0 . 68. Shanghai dang'an guan, Ri wei Shanghai shizhengfu, 6 0 4 - 1 2 ; Tao Juyin, Gudao jianwen, 1 7 9 - 9 0 . 69. I - 1 3 ; I-16; Jiefang ribao, August 2 8 , 1 9 5 5 , and September 7 , 1 9 5 5 . 70. I - 1 3 ; I - 1 0 , March 2 6 , 1 9 8 9 . 7 1 . To "cut off the tail of capitalism" was a nationwide subcampaign during the Cultural Revolution. Its chief target was the "family plot" (ziliudi) in the countryside. In urban areas, small stores became the main target. Xu Jiatun, the former Communist governor of Jiangsu province (and later also the chief Communist representative in Hong Kong, now a dissident exiled in the United States), in his recent memoirs reveals the impact of this slogan in China. See Xu Jiatun Xianggang huiyilu, 1:8. 72. I - 1 4 , March 2 3 , 1 9 8 9 ; I - 1 5 , March 2 3 , 1 9 8 9 . 73. I - 1 5 , August 2 1 , 1 9 9 3 . For the wages and benefits involved in state and collectively run businesses, see Dangdai Zhongguo congshu bianjibu, Dangdai Zhongguo, especially, 6 6 - 7 0 , 3 3 8 - 4 9 . 74. I - 1 5 , August 1 7 , 1 9 9 3 ; I - 1 8 , May 1 8 , 1 9 9 1 . 75. World Journal, May 2 0 , 1 9 9 3 . 76. Ibid., Dec. 5 , 1 9 9 2 , A 1 9 . 77. Ibid., March 1 6 , 1 9 9 3 . 78. Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai: gaige, kaifang yu fazhan, 1 1 8 , 1 3 7 . 79. World Journal, May 20, 1993, A2. 80. The figure cited here represents those who registered for a license. It does not include assistants and helpers, who, traditionally, were mostly members of the shopkeeper's family. 8 1 . Shanghaishi tongjiju, Shanghai: gaige, kaifang yu fazhan, 53. 82. I - 1 9 , June 3 0 , 1 9 9 1 ; I-20. Liu died of bronchiectasis in 1992. His widow is now running the business. To "make things alive" (gaohuo), or to "make the economy alive" (gaohuo jingji), was a popular slogan in China in the 1980s,

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suggesting that the centrally planned economy was at a dead end and that China had to find new solutions to keep the national economy alive and active. 83. I - 1 1 , I - 1 5 , I-19, I-20. The expression "connecting tracks" [jiegui) has been used to describe this situation. The term first surfaced in the early 1990s, meaning to keep abreast of advanced economic and technological systems abroad (i.e., connecting "tracks" in China with those in the developed countries). Later it also meant that the skyrocketing inflation had made many commodities as expensive as they were abroad. And, finally, particularly to the older generation, the "track" has been "connected" to the city's controversial past. 84. Jiefang ribao she, Shanghai jiefang yinian, 3, 35. 85. Yehuo shao bu jin, chunfeng chui you sheng, by the Tang poet Bai Juyi ( 7 7 2 - 8 4 6 ) . This translation is mine. For a complete translation of the poem, see Bynner and Kiang, jade Mountain, 1 1 9 . 86. In his famous 1 9 9 2 "inspection tour of the South," Deng Xiaoping made the following comments on Shanghai: "In the areas of talented personnel, technology, and administration, Shanghai has obvious superiority, which radiates over a wide area. Looking back, m y one major mistake was not to include Shanghai when we set up the four special economic zones. Otherwise, the situation of reform and opening to the outside in the Yangzi River delta, the entire Yangzi River valley, and even the entire nation would be different." Deng Xiaoping, Deng Xiaoping wenxuan, 3 : 3 7 6 .

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